Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from coming out with a new phone line, other than poor management.
Replace “new phone line” with pretty much anything ‘positive’ and it fits Microsoft.
Better OS? Nope! Shit management. Better productivity software? Nope! Shit management. Better cloud and virtualization platform? Nope! Shit management.
The first day I used Windows 8 RC, I was flabbergasted that anyone approved that dumpster fire for release. They’ve been trying to unfuck that ever since, and at dead snail’s pace. Thanks, shit management! You’re why I left systems administration to be a bad programmer!
What do you program in? Ive really enjoyed the new .NET ecosystem, but I’m sure it’ll go to shit eventually just like the rest of their products…
For real. AOSP is open source, and Google is taking more things private. MS could start driving AOSP since FOSS projects go where the group contributing the most wants it to go.
That would force them to adopt different languages internally though. I don’t know what they are doing these days, but something tells me it’s not kotlin and jetpack.
What about Windows subsystem for Android?
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/
It gives developer options where you can sideload unsigned apk files.
I mean, they’ve at least made inroads with Android, it’s not impossible to consider them making moves in the area.
It sure seems like they still do love their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.
That’s really not a big barrier. Just add a couple folks with experience in the desired tech and any good dev team will continue to be a good dev team, even if everything changed under them.
I wish this can be true but that’s bow how trillion dollar companies work. There’s lot of redtape involved. Think of it as one drug dealer is not allowed to deal drugs on other dealers turf. But something tell me if we start praising elon , probably he’ll take the bait and might drive aosp away from google but I also fear he might burn the whole thing down to the ground lol
It’s not that easy on the hardware side. Keep in mind that the way both Google and Microsoft previously entered this market was by buying an established manufacturer (Motorola and Nokia, respectively). But Microsoft squandered Nokia’s manufacturing assets and would need to either start from scratch or acquire somebody else. But there aren’t many manufacturers left that are decent, non-Chinese, and willing to sell.
There’s also the option to pair with a manufacturer and ask them to put Microsoft’s OS on their phones, but Google would most likely lean on anybody attempting that and threaten to revoke their access to Android trademark and Google Services. Samsung is the only manufacturer in a position to tell them to suck it but they’re locked into a complex struggle with Google and it’s anybody’s guess if taking Microsoft on board would help or hinder their position.
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.
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.
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 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.
There were also a bunch of iOS apps behind Android ones. Remember when iOS finally got widgets? Different companies focused on different functionality first. But at this point, android and iOS have had the time to play catch-up with each other.
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This was the downfall of BlackBerry as well.
QNX-based BB10 OS was phenomenal, and their hardware was top notch.
It was the lacking app ecosystem that killed it.
They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones.
Blackberry at their end (circa 2011 or so) started handing out $10,000 grants to developers to make apps for them. I thought about applying for one, but $10K is not much at all to develop a decently-featured app that does anything, and BB’s development environment was such an unbelievable clusterfuck that really no amount of money could have made worthwhile to endure.
Also: 16-bit color lol.
5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green. Who needs more than that?
The only reason I liked it at all was that I created a lot of owner-drawn controls (since the built-in Blackberry “fields” were shit) that used a lot of bitmap memory for animation, and reducing your memory footprint by a factor of two (compared to 32-bit graphics) wasn’t worthless, especially for the older devices.
The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.
The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.
Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.
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 come with those things. There wasn’t even an App Store until a year and a half after it came out. The first gen was pretty much crap. It didn’t have 3g when other phones of the time did. It had the best browser but it was slow as shit. The whole page would turn gray when you scrolled around. There was no copy/paste. You couldn’t sync with Exchange. It was missing basic features that other phones of the time had. It was probably the 3GS or the 4 when it got really good.
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.
Serves them right for what they did to Nokia.
Yes, they were. These bastards destroyed the biggest European tech company for nothing. And Nokia had all the services required and the technical know-how to rival Google.
All credit to Microsoft, but as an ex Nokian my feeling is that Nokia killed itself unwittingly when it bought NavTeq. Because of that sunk cost, they were unwilling to adopt Android as it would invalidate the acquisition, with the leaders responsible still at the reins. Life with Android would be far from the heyday of the past, but living is living.
Too be fair, it was a big bet and at that point it was Nokia’s only chance of remaining at the top. It they had used android at that point in time, they would have started from the bottom in the race for the android domination that was already seeing some large companies fail. Going with Android that late would at best turn them into another Sony Ericsson unless they executed everything perfectly (which wouldn’t happen with the large amount of in-fighting the company had). Going with Windows Phone would be all or nothing. Only time showed it ended up being nothing.
I’m not a Microsoft fan, in fact I think of windows the same way I would an abusive Ex, but there NEEDS To be more competition in the mobile space
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.
Fair enough, what I really want is the ability to have a proper, functional, linux distro on my phone
I’m hoping the slow creep of right to repair laws will help with this. Forcing manufacturers to provide spare parts, documentation and diagnostic tools to independent shops I think will inevitably lead to more open devices in general.
There would already be a vibrant community of smartphone Linux distros right now if bootloaders were unlocked and manufacturers were more forthcoming with documentation.
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.
