alt Hacker NewsParent poster is probably conflating Windows CE, Windows Mobile, and Windows Phone.
Windows Mobile 5 was tremendously popular with over 100 phones from various manufacturers. But that was also around the time iPhone was released and by the time Windows Mobile 6 rolled out, the iPhone 3G/3GS was taking the world by storm. Windows Mobile 6.5 had a partially revamped UI but not enough to be competitive. From there we go to Windows Phone 7, 8, and 10 and that story is well known.
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com2kid • today at 3:07 AM
I worked on WM6, 6.5 and WP7.
WP would've had a better chance if the windows org hadn't murdered CE to move everything over to the Windows Kernel.
Me? Conflating? I think not.
We all dumped Windows CE for Windows Mobile. It was a lot of work and in the end it was an inferior product for pretty much every use case imaginable. The certification was not difficult but costly. Porting practically every application was a huge waste of time and money when they already worked well enough on WinCE.
Windows Mobile, built on WinCE, effectively cannibalized itself. We had Microsoft PMs and engineers tell us WinCE was a dead end. I moved onto to greener pastures before WinCE 6 but my understanding is that it triggered a crisis of faith within at least a few engineering organizations.
There were a number of things Windows Mobile excelled at compared to its predecessor but in particular it excelled at wasting corporate resources.