Absolutely wild that there was a time when Microsoft had three generally well regarded consumer products in Windows 7, the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 all at the same time, compared to where they are now in all of those product spaces.
Windows was Windows, but 7 was largely consistent and didn’t need to be fought with like its successors.
The 360 was the go-to console for developers and gamers, despite the RROD issues, which I’d even give them credit for for handling (eventually) after lots of us got 2 free games and a free controller from them following the debacle.
Windows Phone 7 had a superb interface, great hardware and genuinely stood out.
Now they have nothing and are hated more than ever.
It really was their golden era. Being on MacOS at the time was for artists, wannabe artists, and hippies because Apple was still doing brightly colored iMacs and the iPod hadn’t gotten over the adoption hump yet.
Win7 let you do anything, and worked so well. MS Office was snappy and fast on a processor we probably use in disposable vapes now. Hotmail was THE free email for years. IE was only marginally less good than Opera or Navigator.
I think I spent exactly 5 minutes on Ubuntu or some Linux variant at the time and it was rough.
Times change. They lived long enough to become the thing they tried not to be.
I dare say it, too. I really liked that era. Win7 was cool, the gaming division’s aesthetic and marketing were cool. Original X-Box? Man that was a JAM.
I mean, part of it was just being young and naive too I guess, because I have plenty of memes from the '95 era about how evil Gates was/is. (Internet Explorer was a hot button topic back then!)
But also I think the landscape was competing for favor of the users (however underhandedly as usual) rather than how the landscape is now: Where end users are more of an afterthought and now it’s all just about farming users while billionaires pass money back and forth.
Absolutely wild that there was a time when Microsoft had three generally well regarded consumer products in Windows 7, the Xbox 360 and Windows Phone 7 all at the same time, compared to where they are now in all of those product spaces.
Windows was Windows, but 7 was largely consistent and didn’t need to be fought with like its successors.
The 360 was the go-to console for developers and gamers, despite the RROD issues, which I’d even give them credit for for handling (eventually) after lots of us got 2 free games and a free controller from them following the debacle.
Windows Phone 7 had a superb interface, great hardware and genuinely stood out.
Now they have nothing and are hated more than ever.
It really was their golden era. Being on MacOS at the time was for artists, wannabe artists, and hippies because Apple was still doing brightly colored iMacs and the iPod hadn’t gotten over the adoption hump yet.
Win7 let you do anything, and worked so well. MS Office was snappy and fast on a processor we probably use in disposable vapes now. Hotmail was THE free email for years. IE was only marginally less good than Opera or Navigator.
I think I spent exactly 5 minutes on Ubuntu or some Linux variant at the time and it was rough.
Times change. They lived long enough to become the thing they tried not to be.
I dare say it, too. I really liked that era. Win7 was cool, the gaming division’s aesthetic and marketing were cool. Original X-Box? Man that was a JAM.
I mean, part of it was just being young and naive too I guess, because I have plenty of memes from the '95 era about how evil Gates was/is. (Internet Explorer was a hot button topic back then!)
But also I think the landscape was competing for favor of the users (however underhandedly as usual) rather than how the landscape is now: Where end users are more of an afterthought and now it’s all just about farming users while billionaires pass money back and forth.