
Microsoft phone revenue fell to $5M last quarter, from $1.4B two years ago - doener
https://www.neowin.net/news/yep-it039s-dead-microsoft-phone-revenue-fell-to-5m-last-quarter-from-14bn-two-years-ago
======
lenkite
I really, really liked my Nokia Windows phone. The tile based UI, the smooth
performance and snappy UX, an excellent camera and the way the battery could
last for sometimes 3 whole days without charging. Android phones just don't
compare. And though I like MacOS, I could never get iOS.

Microsoft gave up the war here in the last 10%. They should have put their
head down and persisted. Alas, now we just have two flavors of phone..

~~~
untog
I'm amazed by how much MS messed up Windows Phone. At a certain point they
were right to give up, but only because of their own incompetence.

I bought a Windows Phone 7 device. Loved it. Still the best mobile UI I've
experienced. It had a ton of smart ideas too, like integrating different
messaging services into a central app - totally breaking up the app-centric
model of iOS and Android.

...except they didn't provide any hooks for third party apps to integrate.
Said it was coming. Along with multitasking and other stuff that was already
common in other OSes. It never did. Instead they announced Windows Phone 8,
and stated that almost all WP7 devices would be ineligible for an upgrade,
thus burning their relationship with early adopters. I believe they did the
same with some devices from WP8 to 10. Nowadays they've given up everything
that made WP unique, so there's no need to use it.

Sad thing is, their initial timing was great. Google had dropped the ball on
Android - developing an entire version specifically for tablets (3.0) while
the phone OS floundered. Compared to Android 2.3, Windows Phone was a breath
of fresh air. But by the time they'd decided my phone was EOL less than a year
later, Android 4 was out. I switched back with no regrets. Don't get me wrong,
it would have been an insane uphill climb for anyone, but MS, with their
resources and XBox etc., if anyone could have entered the market, it could
have been them.

~~~
ams6110
Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried. Not sure
why but it's just something they are not good at from end to end, even if some
of the pieces are technically pretty good.

~~~
timthorn
> Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried.

Not true. Windows CE was a solid offering.

~~~
astrodust
By what metrics?

Every implementation of this I've seen has been a slow burn disaster. It's
still deployed, and it still sucks.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I assume they meant the original release/products. In the late '90s, CE
palmtop computers were a joy. I had no idea it was still deployed; it can't
have any real connection to those little pocket PCs I loved.

~~~
astrodust
They were loved by extreme early adopters. In practice they were a nightmare:
Limited software options, terrible battery life, brutally awful screens,
ridiculously big and heavy. They were like a laptop computer crammed into a
brick with all the useful features stripped out.

I knew a few people that loved them, but they were not ordinary people.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
That's rather overstating things. They were limited, yes, but they were fine
for doing email, taking notes, and playing text adventures, which was pretty
much what I wanted them to do. This was the late '90s; nobody expected a
pocket device to have a full-featured web browser and a massive library of
apps. The batteries in mine were for good several days to a week of normal
use. 480x240 greyscale was plenty for text-only work. They were certainly less
powerful than a laptop, but they were also a lot _cheaper_ , at least at the
prices I was seeing in late '97\. And they did well enough that several
different manufacturers released several generations of machines each, over a
period of years.

~~~
astrodust
The Windows CE devices I saw had color screens with a comically narrow viewing
angle, incredibly huge batteries that lasted a hilariously short amount of
time, and required a fussy little pen to use since most operations could not
be done by keyboard alone.

I'm not saying it was totally useless, or that people didn't find it "fine"
for some tasks, but it was like a crippled notebook that could barely do any
of those things. The only advantage it had was size, and even then it still
weighed vastly more than any of the phones from that era. They still cost a
small fortune, maybe half the cost of a decent laptop, but since they weren't
a laptop or a phone you _still_ had to get one of those anyway.

Compare with two competitors from that time, Danger Hiptop and Sharp Zaurus,
took a very different approach: Keyboard centric, good battery life, limited
functionality but focusing on specific things rather than trying to do
everything.

~~~
PhasmaFelis
I never used the later/color models, so that may be the difference. I'm sure
it jacked up the battery burn. The B&W ones ran for a good while, and you
could find low-end models for $150 or so.

As I recall, the pen was fiddly but not necessary; the screen was pressure-
sensitive, so you could use a fingertip just fine, or the eraser end of a
pencil. Modern capacitative touchscreens are much more accurate, but I
sometimes miss being able to use any object as a stylus. :)

------
dep_b
So why exactly do we have a crippled desktop experience in Windows 10 now?
Because it needed to look like a platform that effectively doesn't exist
anymore?

And I like Windows Phone a lot. Perfect for people that just wanted a simple
phone with decent support.

~~~
giancarlostoro
I would of loved to have ditched Android for Windows Mobile but the hardware
options were poor. I couldn't find a phone that had any challenging specs to
the Android options. I care mostly about battery life these days, if Microsoft
would of released more phones and with competitive specs I would probably
still have one of their phones. I only saw one option on my carrier, and it
had 8 hours of battery life, compared to phones that boasted 22 hours of
battery life it's not very impressive.

~~~
Eridrus
I had a Windows Phone, battery life was much better than the Nexus 5/X phones
I've had since.

Windows Phone was much better about resource usage than Android, so the
numbers you saw were pretty meaningless.

The lack of apps was a real issue though.

~~~
qohen
> The lack of apps was a real issue though.

About apps: recently -- i.e. just during the past few weeks -- I've been
seeing adaptations of top-tier designr board-games -- e.g. Terra Mystica and
Galaxy Trucker -- showing up for Windows Phone, in addition to iOS/Android.
Previously, adaptations like this were essentially unheard of.

I've been wondering what has changed to make this happen, if anyone has any
ideas -- e.g. have Windows Phone _tablets_ reached a critical mass that would
make Windows Phone an increasingly attractive platform for these games?

------
open-source-ux
It's a shame to say goodbye to Windows Phone (WP), although it's not
surprising.

I have a Windows phone and think the Windows Phone OS is probably the best
thing that Microsoft has designed. Their desktop apps and operating systems
have a reputation for being clunky and clumsy to use (which I agree with), but
Windows Phone (starting with version 7) was a surprisingly well-designed
mobile operating system.

Yes, WP lacked features compared to Android and iOS, but that simplicity was
also arguably a strength (although they started over-complicating the home
screen in Windows Phone 10 in my opinion).

The other nice thing about Windows Phone was that it was actually different
from both Android and iOS. That too made for a refreshing change. Instead of
the generic grid-of-icons approach, you had tiles of different sizes that
could display app updates.

Finally, I was impressed by the visual design philosophy behind Windows Phone
when it first launched. The designers took inspiration from wayfinding and
airport and metro signage. That made sense for a mobile phone - you quickly
glance at your phone multiple times a day, often while you're on the move. You
need clear, large type to make this easy. The designers seemed to have
purposefully chosen to emphasize type for this reason over the more icon-based
approach of iOS and Android, although this sadly seemed to diminish somewhat
with Windows Phone 10.

~~~
wwayer
My thoughts, exactly. Thank you for putting them in to words.

------
Joeri
Phone hardware was always a bad fit for microsoft. They always saw it as a
vehicle for making a platform play, but to make good phones you have to see it
as an end unto itself. The phone is the business you are in, not the platform
that the phone happens to run on.

~~~
mtgx
Agreed that Microsoft saw it more as an accessory to Windows PCs, at least
early on. However, ultimately WP lost because it was too late. iOS and Android
were too much ahead. Exactly why it was such a catastrophic mistake for Nokia
to go with WP over Android "because it was _different_."

Not saying that Android would've necessarily saved Nokia's crown in the
smartphone market, or even saved it as a company, but I do think it would've
been a smarter strategic play than going with WP. And the only reason I'm even
saying that is because Nokia did a ton of mistakes on its own, before it even
had to make that choice - like waiting until it was too late to make the
decision, or neglecting the Maemo platform, and so on.

~~~
Ologn
Also, Nokia didn't have to choose between Microsoft and Google. They could
have done both, like Samsung did.

In terms of attracting programmers, Android could be programmed on Mac,
Windows or Linux. A developer account was a one-time fee of $25. Apps needed
no approval.

Windows Phone had to be programmed on Windows. A developer account cost $100 a
year or so. Apps went through an approval process. Not that different than
Apple, but Apple was first to market with a modern smartphone and could get
away with this.

~~~
mee_too
Nokia couldn't do what Samsung did. They lacked factories for NANDs, CPUs,
RAM, screens, camera sensors.

~~~
ptaipale
I think Nokia could have done both Symbian and Maemo and even something else
still (if the leadership had not been complacent). But that is all water under
the bridge.

~~~
mee_too
They tried to improve Symbian - I've got their latest and greatest Symbian
device, the 808 and it's a joke.

Even if they could do Maemo, there would've been no apps - Microsoft failed to
attract enough devs, given that there were already 10M .NET devs out there.

------
hadrien01
I'm really sad, because Windows Phone 8.1 was a really good OS, and Nokia made
good and beautiful phones. But Microsoft never seemed to care much about the
OS; they didn't market it well, and some basic functionality was missing five
years in, when they were quite advanced at the beginning.

~~~
bostand
I think they did care, they just couldn't get it right. Just look how horribly
buggy w10m has been despite months of patching and bug fixing.

~~~
MiddleEndian
They made some conscious and poor design choices in w10m. They decided to copy
Android in a bunch of weird ways, too many notifications and inconsistent
keyboard behavior.

~~~
vezycash
12 reasons WP died.

Ms-Nokia actively sabotaged/tripped WP on every step.

1\. Charging $100 yearly developer fee was crazy. ESP since they were the
incumbent and Google was charging a one-time fee of $49 if memory serves me.

2\. MS decision not to allow sideloading of apps basically killed their
chances outside US, UK, Germany... - places without cheap broadband.

Even IOS allowed for apps to be downloaded on a computer.

Many of my potential WP converts ran to Android for this very reason.

AFAIK, MS has issues increasing Store usage on Win10 in my country because
store apps installation files can't be stored offline.

3\. API limitations - if the initial developer fee put a nail on the coffin.
This was the hammer that drove it home. A lot of developers simply quit and
focused on android. The few who persisted habitually wrote messages like,
"...feature cannot be done due to a limitation in the OS"

4\. Speed - if Bill was in charge, WP would be hale & hearty right now.
Ballmer and his people took their sweet time before adding new features - as
if they were competing with resourceless startups or stagnant giants.
Thousands of feature requests flooded Nokia forum, the ln user voice - only
for a handful to be added a year and six months later. E.g. Notification area,
file manager, folders, led notification, wifi direct

5\. Apple worship - IMO WP was Microsoft's first attempt to out-Apple Apple on
design. Win8 was the second and Surface was the third.

They forgot to notice that Apple never copied blindly - copying the spirit of
a design or feature - Apple STOLE.

Since WP, win8..10 all that matters to Ms is looks and pays lip service
usability & productivity.

6\. Nokia released too many phones with nonsensical, confusing naming. They
released flagships with 2 year old processors. And randomly removed features
available in low range phones from high/mid range phones and vice versa.

7\. Nokia att exclusives killed more sales than they would ever know.

8\. Ms/Nokia focused too much on the US market. In fact, Ms behaves as if only
US market exists. Cortana spent more than a year as a US exclusive.

Till today, some Bing features are US only.

9\. Marketing - MS simply didn't market the OS. Nokia - a hardware partner did
100x more marketing than ever MS.

10\. Selling the OS - selling the OS free for the first 2 years would have
bought them many partners esp since Android was free.

11\. Platform reboot - wp7, wp8, Wp8.1, wp10. Every reboot inflicted a deep
wound on fans, OEMs and the OS.

This reboot issue plagues Skype as well. I remember at least 4 reboots of
skype on WP.

12\. Nadella - he buried WP.

~~~
frik
Thanks for the write up, I fully agree.

Ad 12: the current management has little clue and no technical knowledge, they
are milking Windows and Office, until its too late. They fired their QA
departments - their products are getting more and more buggy (e.g. a Top500
company canceled the WinPhone10 plan as the phone address book showed random
profile photos from unrelated Exchange contacts - wtf). Beside enterprise and
public sector, they already burned down their brands. They lost the younger
generations because of pure ignorance and incompetence, Generations X and Y
look elsewhere - ChromeBook/Mac, iOS/Android and GoogleDocs/Pages.

------
pentae
What's really sad is how they took Nokia down in flames with them. I'm really
looking forward to seeing HMD Global rise Nokia out of the ashes - the new
3310 is a great start but without 3G/4G LTE support is DOA. Lots of countries
don't even have the old 2G spectrums anymore. That being said, if I was
Samsung i'd be very concerned about the new Android powered Nokia phones
hitting the market.

~~~
aswanson
Nokia's management made a horribly bad choice in choosing Windows over
Android. It's 100 percent their fault.

~~~
frik
You can read the full story:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Early_leadership_...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Early_leadership_positions)

Stephen Elop is now an infamous business book case. He was a Microsoft
manager, than a trajan horse as Nokia CEO who burned their main platforms,
shifted to WinPhone, de-valued Nokia, MS bought the Nokia devision, MS burned
the devision ... read the article, btw Nokia was the biggest phone and
smartphone (Symbian) manufacturer back then.

~~~
Darthy
If you're assigning blame, don't forget Nokia's board of directors at that
time, who elected Elop and started that whole mess.

------
soneca
I thought there was an anouncement. I had Nokias all my life and my two first
smartphones were Windows Phone and I was pretty happy about it. I still prefer
WP "tile" UI, better use of space and informative home screen. Especially for
my use case, as I don't like handling tens of apps and 95% of my use was
email, browser, Whatsapp, podcasts, online banking, and Twitter.

But then Microsoft effectively announced it quit. After MS signaled it, you
could see even the biggest companies (Facebook and Twitter, my bank) started
to neglect their WP apps. So that was the end.

Now my third smartphone is a Moto G4 Android. I still prefer the 'tile' UI,
but I am changing my user profile. I use many more apps now, like Reddit and
an app for a brazilian website. Not essential, but ok. But having the newest
features early on Whatsapp and a proper banking app are a much better
experience.

~~~
epmaybe
There are Windows 10 launchers for Android that are decent. Not exactly the
same, but you might like it more than I did.

------
bostand
Well, you can't have revenue if you have nothing to sell.

No new phones + removing old ones from stores means no sells.

~~~
morganvachon
That's what I can't understand. Why even buy Nokia if there was no intention
of continuing to manufacture phones a few years later? If they had released
three new phones (low end, mid tier, flagship) in February 2017 they would
have at least kept up with previous earnings. If the flagship model (and
perhaps even the mid tier) were released as the rumored "Surface" models and
specced appropriately, they would likely have seen a small increase initially
and greater sales as the year goes on.

Instead, we get more advertising and less privacy than before, in Windows 10
on the desktop. I'm done, Microsoft.

~~~
bpicolo
I wonder if they aren't hoping to leverage React Native's growth to expand the
platform's app offerings (eventually).

The real problem is that innovation in the mobile space has just stagnated. It
was a 10-year explosive all-in from Apple and Google and the winners are kinda
just in place now. The industry happened very quickly. I don't see a
compelling reason for consumers to jump ship unless something big actually
comes about (why would they?)

------
combatentropy
Microsoft has always been just a mediocre software company led by salesmen.
Their extraordinary success on the desktop depended too much on being in the
right place at the right time. That serendipity didn't happen for them with
phones and likely won't happen again for anything else. They must compete with
the other companies on merit, and they will do so with great mediocrity. Plus,
they now are getting a taste of their own medicine in having to compete with
companies that are entrenched, which may not always be better technically but
have the momentum going for them.

------
Paul_S
... and no one really noticed. Microsoft could do the sensible thing and sell
Android phones.

------
Animats
So Microsoft went to all that trouble to make Windows look like a phone
screen, forcing an inappropriate AI onto laptops and desktops, then blew it in
the phone business.

How's Microsoft's "Surface" thing doing?

~~~
qohen
> How's Microsoft's "Surface" thing doing?

Recent iterations of Microsoft's Surface tablets seem to be doing well [0]:

 _In those early days, the Surface was looking less like an Xbox-style home
run for Microsoft, and more a Zune -like fiasco.

But that's all ancient history -- call it the Ballmerzoic Era. The 2014
Surface Pro 3 became what Microsoft always hoped it would be: the flagship
device for touch computing on Windows, the go-to alternative for those who
wanted both a tablet and a laptop without feeling shortchanged on either
front. The Surface Pro 4 refines the hardware formula even further, and with
Windows 10 on board rather than Windows 8, the platform's final big compromise
evaporates too. Now, the Surface line is the design leader: Apple's upcoming
iPad Pro and Google's Pixel C tablets are the ones aping Microsoft's design,
adding snap-on keyboards and ramping up the multitasking chops of their touch-
first operating systems._

[0] [https://www.cnet.com/uk/products/microsoft-surface-
pro-4/rev...](https://www.cnet.com/uk/products/microsoft-surface-
pro-4/review/)

------
revjx
I had Windows phones for a few years - Windows 7 & 8\. I moved to Android with
a Nexus 5X, but still had fond memories of Windows phone. It was a limited but
snappy little platform.

My Pixel is off for repair at the moment so I've had to revert to the Lumia
735. I've upgraded it to Windows 10. It's awful.

The UI is sluggish, apps take over 30 seconds to load in some cases (Messenger
and Whatsapp being key culprits), and it just generally feels counter-
intuitive to use. I'm hating every second of using it.

------
skdotdan
Mobile is an obvious existential threat to Microsoft.

------
wslh
I think in a few years you could have a mobile phone transformed into a
notebook, like the Microsoft Surface but smaller. In this context Windows
phones can get some traction again.

Indeed I think it is possible right now but nobody is offering a good
transformation. There is a company that is promising this but until today
never launched the product.

------
acjohnson55
I always thought if MS can make Windows Phone run Android apps in a seamless
way, there's hope for it.

~~~
beagle3
They tried to and gave up; the subsystem that runs Linux user mode programs
originated from that work though.

------
thr0waway1239
I wonder if Microsoft is a welcome competitor in those domains where they
don't have any monopolistic advantage. They will help you avoid any anti-trust
issues, while also being too sluggish/dysfunctional to actually execute.

------
Old_Thrashbarg
I had assumed Microsoft had given up on its phone ambitions, so was surprised
to see a Microsoft phone product placement while watching the new movie "Get
Out" last night.

------
chrismealy
I knew people in Redmond who were working on mobile in 1995. Being first is
not always a good thing.

------
HenryBemis
And in one simple meme:

[1]:
[http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/37/37b0641f1cb0ae77dc9b8fc8c8458...](http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/37/37b0641f1cb0ae77dc9b8fc8c84582543f16183b4745a5de1dbb0559473bb3e9.jpg)

------
codecamper
Very good! I can cross off a platform from the stuff to learn list.

------
gesman
Ballmer's "me too!" but always late for the party legacy.

~~~
criddell
Late? Windows Mobile pre-dates iOS by 5 years.

It's interesting that their first attempts were shrinking desktop Windows UI
to work on a phone. That failed so they came up with a phone UI and expanded
it to work on the desktop. What's the third act?

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Yes but Windows Mobile was awful, the reason Apple did so well with the iPhone
was that the rest of the industry had stagnated.

~~~
dageshi
It was the same as all Microsoft products, it was aimed at businesses
primarily where they could leverage all the features that come with a
Microsoft domain e.g. Exchange integration. I worked at a Housing Association
(UK) and we issued all our tradesmen with Windows Mobile smartphones. They
received & completed all their jobs via a custom app we wrote for it, all pre
iPhone.

Microsoft has never been a company that targets consumers directly in my
opinion, they're a company that targets business first and foremost and due to
network effects they effectively got most of the consumer desktop market as
well.

~~~
Roboprog
I guess we can call the mobile market "Revenge of the Consumers" \- "No,
Microsoft, F--k _you_."

While most people just accept the OS that comes on a PC if they buy one, I
don't think they were too anxious to repeat the experience when they clearly
had other choices.

~~~
Roboprog
"The experience" \- starting with the constant pop-up nagware, moving on to
the dismal performance, following with the whack-a-mole update of the week
"thrills", etc.

