I remember in 2013 building software for HMIs running WinCE and back then, it was horribly outdated and a trudge to work on. I can’t imagine how bad it would be today.
We’re talking about the company that once released a utility called the Critical Update Notification Tool (then quickly changed “Tool” to “Utility” when people started laughing). Abbreviations were never their strength.
Some of that has to be engineers taking the piss. We are all the same kind of geek-ass bastard, and we love this kind of stupid thing.
IIRC, IBM’s PowerPC chips had some of their instructions renamed in 1994. There were some very plausible motives given for changing how mnemonics worked. Mentioning flag names was boilerplate, abbreviating “ex-” words as X was too American, that sort of thing. So officially, there’s no particular reason the Enforce In-order Execution of Input / Output command is EIEIO.
On a related note, I'm still annoyed microsoft bungled the windows phone and didn't do more to support app developers. Arguably better than osx and certainly android at the time.
Loved my Windows Phones, I had three of them, and even released an app. I thought the app support, from a technical standpoint, was really good insofar as I could release the same app and have it run perfectly on phones, tablets and desktops. The issue I had with Windows Phones was how they just got steadily worse instead of better. They lost their uniqueness and became closer to Android clones with each iteration, and it was clear Microsoft weren’t fully behind the platform long before the app developers began to leave. Real shame.
They were doomed the moment they needed “app developers.”
Nobody gives a shit about Windows. Nobody. Not one soul. It’s only exciting when it betrays you. Windows persists entirely because it runs the software everyone already has. Hell, I’m in Linux, and I’m still running Windows software, right now.
Would running arbitrary desktop applications on a phone be ridiculous? Yep. But no more ridiculous than making desktop Windows work like a fucking tablet. And now a decade later, high-end phones outclass my laptop from that era. x86 was even an option! Android/x86 was A Thing for a hot minute, and Intel had that little SOC that’d fit in a Game Boy cartridge. Would it run well, or run Windows well, or run Windows programs well? Nope. But it’d do a battery-sucking job of running all the dumb shit people wanted to do with their magical pocket computers.
The ultimate irony is that ARM devices can run any old Windows program now. User-mode emulators like Box86 pair with translators like Wine to fake both the hardware and software of a Windows PC. Microsoft could’ve done that shit, themselves, and pushed some .NET phone where the backend doesn’t matter. Like Android was fucking supposed to.
Would be pretty funny to use the Xbox app on Windows 10/11 running on a Sega Dreamcast. Well, I also put Android on my Nintendo Switch and installed the Xbox app, purely for fun.
In all seriousness, it supports 10/100 ethernet and has negligible DRM, so it really should be capable of remote play. Unfortunately the promise of cloud mainframe nonsense is always betrayed by limiting it to very recent devices that can do just fine locally.
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