The article started with stack ranking, but clearly there were much bigger issues looming.
>“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project recalls...
“Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” Stone tells Eichenwald. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”
They could have been years ahead on phones, tablets, and e-readers. But instead they had a culture that tried to shoehorn a standard Windows experience into every device (I imagine for marketing reasons). They are only now getting over it a decade later, though it's probably more accurate to say they have the same philosophy but in reverse: shoehorn a mobile experience into the desktop in Windows 8.
What difference does it make if you have the greatest engineers in the world but management is blocking them at every turn?
The article started with stack ranking, but clearly there were much bigger issues looming.
>“He didn’t like the user interface, because it didn’t look like Windows,” a programmer involved in the project recalls... “Windows was the god—everything had to work with Windows,” Stone tells Eichenwald. “Ideas about mobile computing with a user experience that was cleaner than with a P.C. were deemed unimportant by a few powerful people in that division, and they managed to kill the effort.”
They could have been years ahead on phones, tablets, and e-readers. But instead they had a culture that tried to shoehorn a standard Windows experience into every device (I imagine for marketing reasons). They are only now getting over it a decade later, though it's probably more accurate to say they have the same philosophy but in reverse: shoehorn a mobile experience into the desktop in Windows 8.
What difference does it make if you have the greatest engineers in the world but management is blocking them at every turn?