[OT] Windows dying

[codephantom]

On Monday, 6 November 2017 at 08:33:16 UTC, Joakim wrote:
> Also, nobody saw mobile growing so gigantic, so fast, not even 
> Jobs by all indications.  Mobile has really been a tidal wave 
> over the last decade.  Funny how all you hear is bitching and 
> whining from a bunch of devs on proggit/HN about how they 
> missed the '80s PC boom or '90s dot.com boom and there's 
> nothing fundamentally exciting like that now, all while the 
> biggest boom of them all, the mobile boom, just grew and grew 
> right in front of their faces. :D

Well, I was there in the early nineties when the Microsoft WinPad 
was being talked about. This was almost 20 years before the iPad 
came out. I remember going through the 90's with Window CE 
interations, which eventually evolved into Window Mobile 2003 - 
which is when I purchased my first 'smart phone', and learnt how 
to write apps for it ( actually my current phone still runs 
Windows Mobile 6.1 ;-).

I tried getting people around me interested in mobile devices, 
including the business I worked in. Nobody was really interested. 
They were all happy with their little push button nokias.

Microsoft had the vision though, and they had it earlier than 
perhaps anyone else. But the vision was too far ahead of its 
time, and, around the early 2000's they refused to lose any more 
money, put it on the back burner, and competitors came in a took 
over - at a time when 'consumers' were just beginning to share 
the vision too....

But I think what really made it take off so fast and 
unexpectadly, was the convergence of mobile devices, mobile 
communication technology (i.e wifi, gps and stuff), and of course 
the internet... as well as the ability to find cheap labour 
overseas to build the produces on mass.

I doubt anyone could have envisioned that convergence...but some 
companies were in a better position (more agile) than others, at 
the time, to capitalise on it.

But the vision of being mobile was certainly there, back in the 
early nineties - and Microsoft were leading it.