
Microsoft Losing Against iPod, iPhone, iOS, iMessage, Slack, Dropbox - tosh
https://twitter.com/garrytan/status/1117808361901191168
======
rchaud
Without a doubt, Microsoft failed, and failed expensively in the
smartphone/tablet wars. I believe there was a $2b writedown on the Surface RT,
as well as $7b + on the botched Nokia acquisition. Those are failures you can
attribute actual dollar figures to.

But for the rest, I doubt MS would have succeeded in those markets even under
the best of circumstances. The iPod made Apple big again, but without Steve
Jobs as the pitchman, it wouldn't have had the massive impact it did. The
offerings of MS (the Zune) and others (Creative, Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony, etc.)
were more than good enough, and they worked with a variety of online music
stores. It's just without the brand cachet of the iPod and Apple's lifestyle
marketing, it's hard to get excited about an MP3 player.

Slack and Dropbox are both huge inside startups, but nonexistent in old-school
enterprise companies. Nobody at work wants yet another login to have to
remember. I know this because I work inside a digital team at a 3000-person
company where everyone swears by O365's out of the box capabilities. Skype for
Business and OneDrive for Business inside of an O365 plan is "good enough" for
a lot of people.

Dropbox has made losses each year since 2015. It's great that it's achieved
good market share since it started in 2007, but maybe there's a limited
enterprise market for something that's a one-trick pony. And one-trick ponies
are the polar opposite of MS' strategy.

~~~
scarface74
_The offerings of MS (the Zune) and others (Creative, Sandisk, Toshiba, Sony,
etc.) were more than good enough, and they worked with a variety of online
music stores._

The Zune came out in November 2006 - less than three months before the iPhone
was introduced and a little bit over a year before iPod sales started
declining.

~~~
ska
Zune was a good example of too little too late. It would have had to be
extraordinary to have made a big impact that late in the game. Instead, it was
perfectly serviceable.

~~~
scarface74
It was even worse.

Microsoft introduced a hard drive based player years after the flash based
Nanos were already more popular.

Then MS released the flash based non touch screen Zunes after the iPod Touch
was becoming popular.

Finally they released the touch screen Zunes after the App Store came out and
the Zunes couldn’t run third party apps. Even the hard drive based iPods had a
few curated third party apps by 2005.

[http://www.appskel.com/ipod-games.html](http://www.appskel.com/ipod-
games.html)

------
melling
Not that I like Microsoft... And I really did like sticking it to their loyal
followers with the iPhone destroying Windows Phone.

Looking back, it’s OK Microsoft lost out on a few things. There’s now a bit
more balance in tech.

Going forward, Microsoft does have some exciting products that could be great.
For example, the Surface and HoloLens.

Apple is dragging their feet with the iPad and AR can’t get here soon enough.
Microsoft hits it big with either of those products and no one will care about
not beating Dropbox or iPhone, etc.

~~~
asveikau
> with the iPhone destroying Windows Phone.

You don't think it was Android that destroyed Windows Phone?

I guess if you want to get technical, Microsoft did.

~~~
melling
Yeah, I guess Android took the part of Windows in Apple vs...

Microsoft thought it was competing against the iPhone:

[https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-iphone-
funeral-201...](https://www.businessinsider.com/microsoft-iphone-
funeral-2010-9)

~~~
asveikau
Even without the funeral story, it was pretty clear they thought Apple was the
competition. Another lens through which I saw this at the time: some of their
arbitrarily-removed or scoped out features early on [think copy-paste], or
dubious restrictions on apps. As if they thought they could copy Apple's
limitations without understanding what it was they did well.

~~~
WorldMaker
It seemed as much like they thought they had Apple's timeline and luck to
follow. In which case copying Apple's limitations wasn't so much a
misunderstanding as a profoundly naïve optimism.

Apple had first mover advantage, so the time it took for them to catch up on
features like copy/paste was negligible because "no one else" had it either,
because consumers thought of it as a new category [0]. Microsoft didn't have
the luxury of first mover advantage (or even second mover because Android).

Apple also had the marketing luck of hitting enough sales power early enough
to control their own fate with the big US telecom carriers (AT&T especially
from the start, but eventually they all played ball with Apple). Microsoft was
expected by the telecoms to follow the old rules that they should have known
by heart from Windows Mobile <= 6.5, not Apple's (still) very special rules,
and that shouldn't have been a surprise. Android played by the old rules and
decided the wild west of fragmentation issues was fine enough.

[0] (That is that they weren't feature comparing the iPhone to say Palm,
Blackberry, or even Windows Mobile 6.x.)

~~~
asveikau
You have way too much "Apple" in this reply, though. They gave the concept of
a smartphone a huge boost, but they are not the market leader. This is another
misstatement of the problem Microsoft got caught in, implicit in my posts
here.

~~~
WorldMaker
I was agreeing with you on that. Microsoft was following Apple far too much in
the early game, and yes, they were ignoring too much of the existential threat
of Android, especially from a hardware standpoint.

For instance, I'd argue the point where Windows phone/mobile lost the "bottom"
segment of the market (esp. in India and "emerging markets"), when the OS
became too hard to run on cheap handsets of the lowest specs, to cheaper
Android knockoffs was a key inflection point where the platform lost so much
of its momentum.

Whether or not you feel that Microsoft buying Nokia was a cause of that or a
symptom of that. It was somewhere between "both" in my mind, in that it was a
symptom of software upgrades at first but snowballed because of the Nokia
purchase. Certainly there were factors that the OS was maybe too quickly
pushing bottom level specs. (As much maligned as the app lifecycles of Windows
8 apps were from a developer standpoint, they did help the platform hit some
very low specs. Windows 10 over-correcting from developer complaints did not
help mobile.) In addition to not solving the telecom carrier software update
problem satisfactorily to OEM needs (as I mentioned), there's also the Android
price match question of whether or not Microsoft dropped the OEM price to
"free" for Windows on the mobile form factor too late to win new OEMs. (They
probably were too late, but there still seemed opportunity at the time they
dropped the price. Again, purchasing Nokia confuses the timing of all that and
which effects were snowballing.)

------
x2f10
Don't forget PS4 / Nintendo Switch. The XB1 isn't selling. Unsurprisingly,
Microsoft is now porting their games to other platforms with a focus on XBOX
Live (service).

------
aNoob7000
Microsoft doesn't care about losing against all these new things; they know
their cash cows are Windows desktop and server, Office suite, and developer
tools.

Nothing is as sticky as Windows desktop and office. Show me anything that
competes with that combination? Even with the advent of the smartphone, the
combination of those two is still unbeatable in corporate America.

~~~
evilduck
There's an entire generation of kids growing up on smartphones and iPads right
now, doing all of their schoolwork on school-issued Chromebooks, many without
ever touching MS Office.

If they don't happen to get into PC gaming with Windows there are kids aged
5-10 right now that might sit down at a Windows PC for the first time in
college or when they start their first job in corporate America. Things could
easily follow Blackberry's path very suddenly when new workers are no longer
familiar with the tools and there's cheaper, faster, and more productive
alternatives that your employees would prefer using and are advocating for.

~~~
mnky9800n
Yeah but they are doing it on microsoft products related to the web like
azure, sql server, etc. microsoft is making money without users ever knowing
they are touching microsoft products.

------
scarface74
Let’s say that Microsoft had “won” the mobile phone war and was in the same
place that Google is now with Android. What would they have won?

Android has only made Google $21 billion in profit in its entire
history....less than Apple makes in one quarter.

[https://www.google.com/search?q=android+oracle+revenue&ie=UT...](https://www.google.com/search?q=android+oracle+revenue&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&hl=en-
us&client=safari)

~~~
WorldMaker
Efficiencies of scale, for one thing. Microsoft with a strong mobile OS
sharing a kernel and a greater software ecosystem with its desktop OS only
_has_ to make an app once and flex that across mobile and desktop. Instead,
Microsoft today absolutely has to build apps for iOS, Android, and Windows to
stay competitive.

This is probably a good thing in the long run for Microsoft as some of its
more innovative work has been when it's tried to focus on cross-platform
software (its founding era, and the early GUI wars, for instances), but that
vision of a single flexible OS across all device form factors is still an
attractive one, especially from an efficiency of scale perspective.

~~~
scarface74
They already tried that. It was a horrible experience with Windows CE. The
.Net Compact Framework was a subset of the .Net Framework. You could run a
.Net compact targeted app on the desktop. I wrote Windows Mobile apps back in
the day. You could also write C++/MFC apps that targeted both. They weren’t
great apps.

But today MS has Xamarin that is a good enough cross platform framework for
enterprise style apps.

~~~
WorldMaker
Don't forget that Windows CE _was_ rather dominant, though. It's partly that
Windows Mobile 6.x was a market leader for long enough that Microsoft somewhat
seemed to ignore the iPhone in its early days.

Windows CE never had the efficiency of scale convergence quite in mind,
though. Windows CE was never quite Windows at the kernel level, for instance,
and it was a competing OS inside Microsoft in some ways that mattered in the
old xkcd siloes pointing guns at each other fashion.

Windows 10 mobile, especially towards the end (Redstone 3) was so very similar
to Desktop Windows under the hood. It was still a fork, but it was a
converging fork.

(UWP still sometimes gets unfavorably compared to the .NET CF, but UWP has
always been more powerful and capable than CF and CE-era C++/MFC, even at its
"worst" when Windows 8 launched. Especially now that .NET Core is open source
and "leading" the .NET Framework/.NET standards rather than vice versa, UWP is
much stronger than .NET CF ever was.)

------
ulfw
Does one single company have to own every single market?

What is the fascination with monopolies?

I for one am happy there‘s choice

------
bartimus
Their biggest defeat was perhaps the browser war. They were so strongly trying
to dominate the open standards they totally forgot about the applications.
Funny how Qt and Electron are now exactly where Microsoft had always wanted to
be.

~~~
ahartmetz
Are they? AFAICS Microsoft in the past never wanted to rule cross-platform
anything. They just wanted to be the only (OS) platform, using UI toolkits as
a means to that end.

~~~
WorldMaker
Microsoft was founded on cross-platform. Their goal was clearly to have their
software on every "home computer" regardless of manufacturer. Owning the OS
just makes that goal easier.

Even the early GUI era you could see Microsoft hedging bets and trying to be
the best Macintosh software company while working on Windows. Even as late as
the XP/Vista timeframe you could see that Microsoft was often proud of being
_the_ largest third-party software vendor for the Macintosh. (That statistic
got shaken up soon after, IIRC, but Microsoft held that position for a long
time.)

Cross-platform certainly isn't a new attitude for Microsoft. In some ways it
seems a return "home" to when they were the BASIC provider for every computer.
(Though the argument of whether or not BASIC then was an OS platform is a
fascinating one, which is why both perspectives are "correct".)

------
nailer
I think we all knew this by the end of the Ballmer period.

------
based2
I wonder why Amazon does not have already a Gmail / Outlook live solution.

~~~
clintonb
Why should they? How would such a product relate to any of their current
offerings?

