No, I’m looking at the past from the perspective of having lived in the past, listened to consumers, been employed in IT support which (at the time) included helping with cell phones deployments for our company, and reading all the relevant tech reviews and commentary about them. And I’m certainly a Windows supporter, having switched my Mac using wife over (mostly so we could game together, but still).
These were not well received or well liked products. The amount of complaints about the square UI were legion, people HATED it. I had to listen to them tell me they hated it, which is anecdotal of course, but born out by surveys and reviews and the fact THEY DROPPED IT. If anything, your comments are looking back with rose colored glasses on.
I come from the same background as you (I was at IT support back then), but I had a radically different experience; actually I had more problems with the original iPhones, as many of my users came from Windows CE, Blackberry and Symbian devices.
So, you’ve switched from “consumers really liked these” to “I had fewer problems with them.” That’s an entirely different metric and your still comparing personal preferences with the overall consumer response.
In terms of consumer response, these products did abysmal sales. Windows phones, Windows 8, and the Zune were not well received. Windows phone managed, at its peak, to gain a total of 4% of the phone market, which for Microsoft is simply an abysmal number and reflective of how much people disliked the new UI and the block format. Windows 8 routinely is listed as one of the 3 worst versions of Windows ever released (along with ME and Vista), and often tops the list.
Zune sold as poorly as the phone. Maybe it was better, maybe not. I never had one so I can’t say (never had an iPod either, to be fair; both were too expensive as far as I was concerned). But they pushed an unwanted product into an already full market and no one was willing to ditch a brand-new iPod or other mp3 device for what might be an only marginally better Zune. Eventually people moved away from dedicated MP3 devices anyway because they could do it all with their phone anyway.
“We shouldn’t have killed mobile. Now its vengeful spirit haunts all our other products. We need an exorcism but it’s been a long time since any priests would even talk to us.”
