
Why Microsoft isn’t the smartphone leader it should be - PretzelFisch
http://thenextweb.com/microsoft/2016/12/30/why-isnt-microsoft-the-smartphone-leader-it-should-be
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oldmanhorton
I don't care if it's Microsoft or canonical or whoever wants to have their go,
but I am so, so ready to leave both Android and iOS. I have a pc so half of
the iPhones features are useless to me (I never really cared for the platform
to begin with), and android constantly annoys me these days. Give me a phone
with a browser, nice screen, and a battery big enough for me to never worry if
I charge it every night. Nokia and Microsoft were close with the lumias, it's
so frustrating that they stopped.

Edit: I know I can still buy a lumia 950/xl or an older Windows phone, but
some amount of platform support would be nice.

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chrismealy
I think MS may have been too early on mobile. If they had come out later they
might have come up with something original, rather than just putting Windows
on a phone. I remember a friend tapping the start menu with a stylus and
opening up the D: drive. On a phone. Who wants that?

~~~
PretzelFisch
I never thought the stylus was that bad, and worth the effort to get email,
word and excel.

~~~
chrismealy
On a 2004 phone with a tiny screen?

~~~
PretzelFisch
yes, I had a tablet computers that also needed a stylus, so maybe I was
already trained to accept it.

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cbanek
I worked at MSFT on Windows Mobile, and somewhere I still have my "Ship it"
for Win Mobile 6.5. Thoughts are of course my own.

I remember when the iPhone came out. It was amazing, and really had us beat in
usability, and friendliness. But all the execs and bigwigs at MSFT were really
pushing for Windows Phone to be the new Blackberry.

Blackberry had some of the best business facing features, like remote wipe and
access policies. This kind of top down IT control, and trying to sell more big
ticket MSFT licenses (like exchange) were the focus, and not at all normal
users. It was all about selling to businesses, and then have "trickle-down"
where users would buy phones themselves.

This was the opposite of the Apple strategy: making something so usable that
everyone can use it, and then forcing offices to accept iPhones on their
network.

All these years later, it's been interesting to watch, but I'm glad I got out
of the mobile space. And yes, I have an iPhone now.

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sunstone
This article neglects to mention the primary factor in MS's failure to gain
traction in the mobile space and that is it wanted to replicate its hugely
profitable business model from the desktop. Is they would make the mobile OS
and license it to the hardware makers.

The problem was that hardware makers, familiar with how MS treated them with
Windows wanted nothing to do with licencing anything again from MS, and so
they didn't.

MS at that point had the choice of going it alone with their own hardware or
effectively dropping out of the market. Since they had almost no hardware
expertise at the time and, I suspect, felt the market was too small to be
worth the effort, they demured.

Even today when MS has new software that requires non PC hardware they have to
do the hardware themselves.

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norea-armozel
Microsoft just missed the boat on this one. They initially had some presence
in the mobile market but left it to others to take it over. Personally, I
think Microsoft would be wise to focus on the next stage of mobile devices
rather than trying to fight it out over smart phones since very few vendors
make the kinds of profits that Samsung (on a good year) or Apple do. It's a
race to the bottom in that regard and so I think Microsoft's Hololens could be
a signal that they're putting out feelers for the next big thing. If AR turns
into that thing and they're ready to take a position then they'll win big. If
they ignore it this time I expect them to lose further relevance as other OSes
eat their consumer market share.

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rektide
This story goes through a play-by-play of the bad sectors for MS mobile over
the years, & broadly concludes that MS didn't push hard enough or didn't
embrace hardware soon enough. I find it boring and ignorant and not
contributive in how it puts each step through the wash and then makes a broad
generalization of what MS ought of have done, which is unsubstantiated "dream
big" koolaid.

MS never had a chance. They had no apparent technical choice but to ride their
historical platform's success into the new mobile world, to reshape the
interface and APIs that had served them then into new ones that would build a
platform. That didn't exactly fail, but the platform was as ancient decrepit
and unappealing to outside developers as it got, and a rough start for
hardware makers. The article places the blame on MS for not making hardware
but even if they had better hardware offerings it's hard to imagine the
software side of things- app makers, app store buyers- having taken off. Where
were the kingmakers- the various software developers willing to put hard work
into an app store that would barely pay out- willing to invest enormously in a
platform with few competitive advantages, a small market, and the most aged
platform around? Was there anything technically exciting about the software
stack to lead devs to it? Were devs going to get broad expert wisdom from
using the MS stack? No. MS software platform has been an unsophisticated,
isolated, lonesome base. There's been well over a decade of C# and a
consistent decade of that .NET platform having F# as the one lure for devs
that want to feel better about themselves.

MS at least tried to get JS devs somewhat on board, but it was still far shy
of the sophisticated olive branch WebOS had held out. The general unappeal was
furthered crippled by IDE demands- for the longest time and probably still
today MS assumes it was ok to have Windows Phone developers have Microsoft
OSes. A massive number of devs escaped to OSX long ago to run web-oriented
OSS, and the legion of Linux has remained unphased over the decades now:
neither had much enthuse for picking up MS toolchains, for regardless of how
good they and their IDEs are or what merits they bring they've always been
distant worlds from the normative baseline Linux that the biggest segments of
software development (web development) target and ship on.

> Perhaps the biggest reason why Windows Phone (and later Windows Mobile)
> suffocated was that there was a vacuum of consumer enthusiasm.

If one is asking the question, why did the platform fail, this is an
inadequate response. No one buying it is a symptom of failure, not a cause.
I've suggested that the reason no one bought the platform was because there
was no software for it, and there was no software for it because everyone had
already had 20 years of Windows development and thought it was A) pretty
technically boring by now and B) that those skills wouldn't translate into the
pertinent money making skill of building "master-server" software that
actually runs the internet and makes all the money (Google, Facebook, &c). The
Windows Phone platform had no draw for the developers. People are only
interested in what the platform brings them, and one of our primary senses of
how vibrant and useful a platform is is having good stories showing ongoing
progress for the software launched on that platform. MS could never create
that story by themselves, no matter how well they made the platform and how
much software they built for it- the sign that a platform is doing ok is when
it is widely and independently developed for, and the way to draw developers
into that is to either already be a huge cash cow or to make yourself hugely
accessible to existing software development sectors. WinJS wasn't a complete
failure in accessibility, but it also wasn't seamless and doable enough for
the Macbook and Linux crowd, who have been busy getting sizable paychecks
building web-apps for a long time now.

