Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
It is funny to me that they gave up on the Windows phone right when it was starting to actually kinda work and gain some market traction.
It was literally during an era where people were leaving iphone in droves (begrudgingly) for android. Windows phones could have easily stolen a ton of marketshare from Samsung and Google.
By the time he was CEO it was already dead. He was right to kill it.
I have my doubts that a three-horse phone race would have been stable in the first place, as one of those three (Android, iPhone was too established) would have likely fallen out of favor. And then, you all would be complaining about monopolistic practices Microsoft would inevitably be doing.
Google is not a good company, but they have treated Android much better than they could be.
Had Microsoft succeeded, things could have ended up the same as the pc market, with windows being used by big brands and Android being used by companies like 2011 Xiami, making highly customized experiences and that sort.
They say Microsoft lost Samsung to Android by being one month too late. Had they finished that first windows phone one month earlier, everything would probably be different today.
There really was something about the windows phone UI though. If you weren’t around to try it, it’s hard to properly explain how different and fresh the flat pane interface felt compared to iOS and Android. It really was a phenomenal design language compared to the same old thing in the market.
I honestly believe it they had just sucked it up and subsidized the cost of doubling the ram on those last Nokia devices, it could have been good enough to break through. Microsoft had everything possible to gain from integrating the desktop-to-mobile workflow for business clients. Then they threw it out the window…
Seriously, I doubt many people here who aren’t used to corporate environments can fully understand how big the market was, that Microsoft gave up, by not spending enough to fill the BlackBerry hole that formed. They had 98% of the solution already developed, and fumbled the ball with a single yard left to go.
There was room for three players, if one of them actually serviced the business environment; and nobody was better positioned to do so than Microsoft at the time. Excel and PowerPoint that synced from your work machine, to the field, in a zero trust environment… Gah… they were so close.
I had Lumia, on Windows 8 it was okayish, but when it moved to Windows 10…oh my god it was amazing. And the fact that you also got an amazing screen and amazing camera made the experience magical
They really needed to listen to their enterprise customers. Windows Phone could have easily taken over as the ‘corporate phone’, if it had any integration at all. With the side benefit that their corporate customers also employ the developers that could build out the apps they needed to create the marketplace.
Instead they tried to take on Apple and Google, in an end user space that had already been thoroughly saturated, with a product that was barely on par.
De-Googled android is what you want.
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They did have some programs to try and push more apps, but dropped the ball far too quickly for it to gain traction.
Microsoft essentially shipped free phones out to everyone that wanted to make or port a windows phone app. Heck, I got one just to port over the schedule app I made for my small high school at the time and had maybe 300 installs.
The dev environment was actually a lot nicer to work with than the android one at the time as well.
It’s never too late for another try, when you got a few billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket. There is a market for it, if done right.
They’d have to have a significant USP, they’d be competing with 2 extremely mature OSs
Android Subsystem for Windows
I think they can still reboot with an Android base. They can just do what they did for edge. Pull a Google. Sell hardware with very polished software. Android would give them full access to all Android apps. Also they already have outlook and office apps made for android.
Honestly I would rather see a large company like Microsoft build their own OS from the ground up. Without play services you wouldn’t be able to use a lot of play store apps even if you installed the apk file. I think Google provides a lot of baked in services to developers to lock their apps into the google ecosystem. Microsoft wouldn’t really add anything of value to android in my opinion, we already have one big company looking over our shoulder, I don’t think we need a second. I think the Amazon Fire phone proves that even with a lot of money to burn it’s hard to break into google’s market.
Microsoft making their own platform that is not UNIX-like would probably get a lot more interest than just modifying android.
They are going to have the same problem they had with their original phones. No apps. They could never get enough developers to care about the OS without a user base. You also can’t get a user base without apps. That’s what killed the windows phone.
Amazon tried to use the kindle formula on a cell phone. The problem is that the main reason the kindle was successful was there was no real competition. They also only need to provide books not apps for the kindle. The cellphone market was a lot more mature with a ton of options. They came in with a mediocre phone that had less apps and less configurability. They tried to do the Apple walled garden on an Android phone. Clearly they didn’t understand their market.
I don’t think there is all that much money in handsets, which is why every phone company does their own weird version of Android to try to get advertising revenue on the back end.
That is correct. The money is made on the searches. With their own phones, they can push their own search engine and Ads. Google did it so they could force other makers to standardize. Microsoft can do the same thing. You make money the store. Android just makes it easy to port apps to Microsoft’s app store Developers won’t be required to code a new app just for Microsoft.
microsoft does have a launcher for android. I’ve heard good things about it, but haven’t used it myself so can’t confirm
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Android open source bits are fine and all, but a lot of apps require Google Play Services which is not open or free.
Google Play Services has some quite strict requirements to adhere to in order for Google to licence that to you.
This includes have certain Google apps preinstalled on the device. Including Chrome.
I also doubt Microsoft would be happy with Google having the ability to cut them off whenever they damn well please.
There are a ton of phones in China running Android without google services . If you try to cut off Microsoft you would also be hurting all those Chinese phones. Google also can’t do that without being sued by Microsoft for not allowing competition.
Well, the idea behind FOSS is that you can share the common stuff and build your own stuff on top and while doing so improving the common stuff, testing uncommon usecases and adding features.
Personally I would love to have another bigger company working on Android next to Google, because that means they would (hopefully) implement their own “google services”, to not rely on Google.
If that takes off, then apps will need to support both, making it more sensible to either create stable generic interfaces, where a third completly open-source implementation can more easily dock into, or not rely on them unnecessarily.
The only real problem with android is that the license is not GPL, so companies are not required to cooperate and likely end up creating their own silos.
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I feel like the steam deck proves that we aren’t really all that far from a feasible mobile linux device. Its like 90% of what a phone OS would need to be. I’d buy a Steam Phone from Valve. Imagine an accessory with controllers, access to the whole steam store, and the ability to dock to a TV or monitor. I think that could actually work, especially since so many games are already compatible with the deck as it is.
Windows Phone failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.
Actually, the main cause it failed was because Microsoft bullied the manufacturers until they said enough and bailed out. So they were forced to buy a manufacturer to keep going (Nokia) then gave up halfway through after buying it.
Microsoft has stupid amounts of cash and could have kept Windows Phone going indefinitely, even at a loss. It’s how they broke into the console market, by keeping the Xbox going at a loss for a decade.
Yeah the lack of apps would have been a problem initially but everybody would have relented given enough time, and in the meantime most of the missing services could have been accessed in a browser.
They literally couldn’t pay the devs. Netflix for instance flat out refused to have blackberry pay for 2 full time devs to maintain an app.
Netflix looked at the market share and determined that there was 0 benefit. The people that were on blackberry devices already had a Netflix account.
Additionally Blackberry store apps were compelling for devs. Dev feedback included ease of development and more importantly they made a lot more money on the blackberry store than on iOS/android, both because the cut was better and they could jack the prices up because the customers were not nearly as frugal.
To get into mobile would require a massive overhaul of windows apps to get them mobile-friendly
Oh look, that’s exactly what they did and now we have PWAs for lots of apps. Maybe MS is getting ready to take a stab at mobile again.
Netflix have a different relationship with Microsoft than they did with Blackberry, MS would have had much more clout.
That is because every single mobile version of Windows was incompatible (After version 6) with the previous. They kept reinventing the wheel over and over again.
They couldn’t even be bothered developing their own apps for it. The mail app began to lag behind Outlook on Android, Minecraft was never ported to it when it could have been a killer exclusive app.
Google was often guilty of that too. I remember a number of Android apps that were pretty far behind the iOS ones. I don’t think that is the case anymore though.
Yep, if you don’t even have the stuff the first iPhone came with, your platform isn’t going to make it.
The first iPhone didn’t have anything. In terms of features it was laughable and it could barely be considered a smartphone. It succeeded because it was a phone on a touch screen that worked better than any previous attempt at touch screens.
Everything that made iPhone relevant against Android only came out later. Apple had a large quick start on hardware and UX, Android had a large quick start on the feature set. They both worked to close the gap and now we have two very similar products.
Microsoft didn’t have that gap with Android on the OS level in any way. It could do everything. But they didn’t have apps, because the devs didn’t want a third OS to exist. Devs who just wanted to expand their customer base were making apps for wp just fine. Companies who wanted to manipulate the market into what was more convenient for them did not. Regular folks were making apps to get YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and that sort of stuff working on wp just fine - someone even made a Pokémon Go client that actually worked on windows phone, but the companies behind those platforms actively wanted those apps to not exist in any way.
I worked selling cellphones when Windows Phone was trying to compete. Their failure was lack of apps. From what I understand, it was difficult to port apps from Android or iOS to Windows Phone OS. It’s a shame because the user experience was bar none. Hell, I installed a Windows OS theme on my Android for years. I still think they could make a comeback if they made an actual, honest to God Windows Phone that ran all Windows apps.
If they wanted to compete today, they’d fork Android in a similar fashion to how Edge moved to Chromium.
I think this is a reason the Zune touch did poorly too.
Zune was not especially great in terms of what it could do, true, but the hardware was also shit. Also, the first gen Zunes all bricked at one point due to some programming error.
I could’ve sworn the Zune HD’s specs were better than the current gen iPod touch.
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yeah, more competition - not another gigantic conglomerate that wants to integrate my phone into my operating system.
more competition would be great, another google/apple type - meh.
Unfortunately only a ‘gigantic conglomerate’ stands a chance against Google and Apple. The other smartphone OSs - Ubuntu, Manjaro etc. - have a tiny market share.
Just look at how Firefox OS struggled even in developing countries, where it could run much better than Android in low-end smartphones. Then Reliance (a big and very cut-throat company) licenced it and now it has a decent marketshare in India. There are plenty of good alternative OSs, but without a big war chest they aren’t getting mainstream acceptance.
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MS took too much time to respond to the iPhone and Android. By the time they had released the Windows phones, it was too late. Those phones were shit too.
I had one of them, a Nokia one. They we’re not.
Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.
I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.
My brother had one and loved it! But outside of basic tasks he couldn’t do anything with it. Eventually he switched to Android just to have apps.
I tried it, but then realized I couldn’t even view my photos I took with my Nexus phone at the time. No Google photos app, and the web browser just took me to a page that said my phone isn’t supported.
YouTube was also only supported via a third party app, and was missing pretty much every feature.
As soon as I realized I would struggle to do the most basic tasks, I bailed.
I actually had a W10 phone as my work phone. I had no issues with the OS, but app availability was absolutely abysmal. All the crazy W8 touch optimizations suddenly made a lot of sense. Too bad it died so soon.
name a few. please.
I’m open to being wrong but you need to provide evidence to sway me, because I’ve used windows phones and developed for them when they were desperate to get games in their app store and it was wretched early on. like comically bad. so whatever firmed up over the years, please, enlighten me, I’m genuinely curious where they were years ahead.
It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The “people” app already had everything the android’s “contacts” app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.
The “me” app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.
I don’t remember what it was, but the “mail” app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.
Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don’t have in android today.
In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google’s (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald’s in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).
Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.
this was a response worth reading. TY for the deets.
Dark mode and live widgets.
Edit to add: https://www.howtogeek.com/809114/5-ways-windows-phone-was-ahead-of-its-time/
my favourite windows phone moment was when they had a funeral for the iphone lol
As much as I dislike Microsoft, back in 2015 I used Windows Phone 8.1 for about 6 months and I absolutely loved it, the UI was so smooth and polished, even on low end phones, until WP10 came out and it ran like trash and I went back to LineageOS.
Microsoft didn’t even provide a proper upgrade path for it’s users. WP7 couldn’t go to 8 and same for Windows Mobile 10.
Internally they were two very different things. WP7 was their old windows mobile with a new skin, while WP8 was the actual OS they had been working on for a long time. They felt the same but were very different. I guess they didn’t think it was worth the hassle trying to figure out how to handle that update.
I don’t know what was the deal with 10 though (I forgot it even existed tbh).
I really miss that UI, live tiles were so nice. there’s launchers on android that mimic it, but it’s not the same.
