Windows Mobile

And this is years before the iPhone.

They built a prototype with a Windows mobile phone, a Bluetooth GPS receiver, and a lot of duct tape.

Rough, but it worked.

The insight was that the phone could do more than show a map.

It had a name.

Windows Mobile, I think.

I don't know.

Anyway, so there's this mobile operating system from Windows with the tiles and all of the stuff.

I wish...

Could you imagine a Duo, Microsoft Duo with Windows Mobile? Would that work?

Oh, dude.

Oh, I mean, well, they were, they-

Do you remember Windows 8, the tablet form where it had the, the tiles?

Yeah.

So you could actually have, like, Windows Mobile on the cover and then a Windows 8-esque.

Even though it didn't do well, it'd be perfect for a...

Remember, this was at a time when the iPhone looked like this, and was still made out of plastic.

The software was the then 10 years old Windows Mobile.

I began customising Windows Mobile.

With some great difficulty, I got some good results.

You know, I always just thought, I could make that look better.

And then they made the Pocket PC to compete with the Palm Pilot in the late 90s.

And then we had Windows Mobile.

And then we put a radio stack in there and became Windows Mobile Smartphone Edition.

You know, Microsoft horrible naming conventions, you know, make it really long.

And doing that.

And so I had to go there to help bail them out.

Yeah.

It was during the later kind of mobile years, you know, that when I was at Microsoft, obviously we used to have this windows mobile and windows phone and they had built, you know, it was a time when they were trying to make their trains more like airlines and let people go on their phone and change their seats and do lots of great things for the train trips.

So when the tooling and resources became available, that's what started my journey with Windows Phone before it launched a few months later in October 2010.

Windows Phone wasn't the first mobile platform endeavour for Microsoft, as their Windows Mobile Platform launched 26 years ago in 2000, which evolved throughout the years as a mobile platform that although popular at the time was not well known generally.

It would be many years later, around 2008, that I became interested in getting a Windows Mobile 6 device.

I eagerly awaited the release, but unfortunately it had major issues.

However, Microsoft acquired Danger that year, which was the company behind the Sidekick, which was famously used by Paris Hilton at the time.

So I decided to wait for a potential Windows Mobile version as my first smartphone.

Two years later in 2010, what came from this was not what I had expected.

It was the Kin 1, which was based upon the Danger Sidekick and Kin 2, which arrived and then were cancelled in quick succession, so I wasn't going to get one of those devices either.

By 2011, we conquered all four mobile operating systems.

We started with Windows Mobile, I conquered that, and then we went to Apple, iOS, and then from there, I went into the Blackberry, if you still remember the Blackberry.

I think they're still around, but not making phones

anymore.

But as a recipient of that, you sort of got the ability to experiment, right? You got some freedom to go, "Hey, you know, you did this great thing.

Let's see what you can do to, to, you know, further Microsoft." And so my Spanish knowledge, my, uh, bravery in going to Venezuela basically set me up to do amazing things and to work on Active Directory, SQL Server, Windows Mobile, Xbox Live.

Like, I, I got to go and work on all sorts of really cool things in my time there.

All from identity perspective.