> And despite finding a way to get this kind of positivity from me, a former OS/2 zealot and long-time user of free operating systems, they still managed to completely fuck up the entire operation.

Indeed. I've ranted on this a bunch, but tldr; all they had to do was keep making cheap phones that worked surprisingly well and building the install base; but they wanted to focus at the top of market and wm10 was a disaster.

> It remains the only example of a Windows Phone device that I'm aware of ever having seen someone use in the wild.

They had some placement in Scandal or House of Cards, I think. Was pretty weird for me as a WP user to hear the ringtones and see the UI on the shows I was watching. Not a whole lot of market penetration in the US, but pretty decent in lower income countries where something that was very inexpensive and worked enough had legs.