Reply to post: Re: So blameMicrsoft because it doesn't innovate...

Ex-Windows designer: Ballmer was dogmatic, Sinofsky's bonkers, and WinPho needs to change

Tom Maddox Silver badge
FAIL

Re: So blameMicrsoft because it doesn't innovate...

"Most people will struggle at first with any different device. Give Linux to a Windows user (and even OSX), and he or she will struggle with it in the beginning. Why smartphones took so many years to become mainstream?"

Smartphones took so many years to become mainstream because they were expensive and unintuitive, and data plans were usuriously priced, thus they remained in the purview of ubergeeks. Whatever its technical failings, the iPhone introduced an intuitive interface in a slick package, and Apple was able to lean on AT&T to sell it with more attractive data plans. I am far from an Apple fanboi and have never found the Mac UI to be particularly intuitive, but the basic UI manipulation of iOS was dead simple to understand (and I've watched plenty of non-technical people pick it up quite rapidly). Accessing advanced features may be more cumbersome, but by the time users get to that point, they've already made a decision about the device and its UI.

The problem that Microsoft faces is that it's competing against an entrenched base of users who are familiar with the UI paradigms of iProducts and Androids. Whether the WP UI is "better" becomes irrelevant to the vast majority of people when the existing paradigms are both good enough and familiar. As someone who installed CyanogenMod for what I consider a superior user experience to the vendor Android build which shipped on my phone and then went through a certain amount of pain to update CM to the latest snapshot build, I'm curious about WinPho but not enough to spend money on what may turn out to be a white elephant.

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