I do. I remember Microsoft stores too. They went 20% of the way and stopped, and decided that extracting rent from Office and Azure was all the work they wanted to do, rather than continue investing in hardware and in person support. Same with Google and their devices, except they did not even bother with in person support.
Depends if I wanted to compete with Apple or not. I would have spent whatever it took. The board members at these companies obviously decided that cash now was more important than competing with Apple.
>A sunk cost fallacy is only applicable if the assumption is the venture would result in failure.
The sunk cost fallacy is not really about what the venture would actually do. One could be said to have fallen prey to it even if they double down and the venture eventually succeeds.
What's important is that at the time of the decision (a) the path doesn't seem to be working, and (b) they think "but I've spend too much to quit now".
This is more likely when one assumes it can still has a chance to succeed, than if they assume it will inevitably result in failure. Nobody that assumes inevitable failure would decide to continue.
I did not feel it needed to be specified since it is a trivial fact that nothing in life is certain. But Apple's product offering is a top to bottom customer experience involving in person help at stores around the country. Microsoft must have acknowledged that, since they went as far as opening stores and coming out with that line of non malware Windows products (as a side note, it is ridiculous that Microsoft even let their ecosystem get to that point). Which, yes, they might have had empty stores, but that is because they failed to continue investing in their mobile products, or even non mobile products. They would have had empty stores for 10+ years while they slowly build it all up, just like Apple had to.
All I know is at this point Microsoft had two options: continue investing into creating an alternative to Apple, or cancel their plans and sit back and let the Office/Azure revenue flow in.
Maybe it was a long shot, maybe they decided the size of Apple's customer base divided by two was not enough to satiate them, but whatever the case, they signaled that they do not have the talent/gumption/appetite for risk to pull it off. But if any company did have the opportunity to go for it, I would think Microsoft (and Google) with their income stream would have been in position to do it.
Both companies seem to dip their toes, but never follow through.
As a Mac guy I thought that the Windows Phone wasn't a bad device. My buddy had one and it had all sorts of great features but they all worked within the Windows/x-Box universe he was in.
I would have liked to see it succeed if only for there to be more competition.
Yep the phones were actually in terms of OS and hardware equal or better than iOS/Android. However even back then, the app ecosystem hurdle was already insurmountable.
This just proves it’s even harder. Even if by some insane luck you manage to build something that is very good, the general public still doesn’t want it.
I'm pretty sure it could have worked, their phones were getting traction in Europe, if they did not do the big framework screwup which destroyed their developer base, it would have worked.
