Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.
I’m sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They’ve never done it before and it’s just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft’s best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn’t enough.
Meanwhile, they’ve done really well with their “apps and services on every platform” approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of “mobile,” but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.
A lot of businesses use windows as their main OS for people to use, MS could have used that skew to get a foot in the door with the windows phone. It would have been incredibly helpful and convenient for those business folks / office workers to be able to use all their windows stuff on their phone seemlessly.
TBH i feel that door hasn’t closed yet if they made a real category breaking new entry like a dedicated business phone that was like windows but on your phone.
Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work. Apple, meanwhile, licensed Microsoft Exchange for iPhone and basically established Microsoft’s entire product strategy under Nadella: providing high-margin services on whatever device people actually want to use.
They definitely did with Surface. They stumbled for a bit but the Pro 3 - 4 made 2-in-1 laptops actually good.
The windows phone was not out for very long. It is unknown if it would have succeed, but at the time Android was an also ran as well, and non-smart phones still dominated. Blackberry was still a major player to beat at the time. Windows if they stuck with it might have done reasonably well. It would never have become a monopoly, but we cannot know how well it would have done.
What year was Android an also-ran?
2013: 51.8% Android, 40.6% iOS, 3.8% Blackberry, 3.3% Microsoft
To be fair, Windows Mobile had been out for many years. The very first convergence phone I ever used was a Windows Mobile phone, iPaq 6315 or something like that, a solid 2 years before the first iPhone came out. Still used a stylus, but it was showing us what the future was.
I think it’s a safe prediction considering the number of large manufacturers that have gone under between then and now leaving us with just the Galaxy, IPhone, and Pixel outside of remaining ‘boutique’ manufacturers that don’t really sell any volume.
No it wasn’t. MS was well behind at the time, and the market had settled on Google and Apple as the two mobile OS providers. The mistake would have been to keep going.
It’s really was.
Mistake for them but good for consumers. We all need more competition in this industry
Microsoft had every advantage. They were in the mobile space for years before Apple with PocketPC. They also had a freaking tablet.
They fucked it up with uninspired design (a start menu and task bar on a mobile?!) and lack of follow through.
Fuck you, I loved the design of windows phone. Bring able to size the tiles different and have them show content on the home screen was awesome. And the hardware was cool too. I still look at the photos I took on my windows phone and compared to my galaxy s22 ultra they still look just as good if not better in some cases.
Honestly the wort thing about win phone was salty developers who not only refused to port apps over no matter how easy MS made it, but also went well out of their way to shut down any community apps made using their API, like the Snapchat dead did.
If you’re talking about WinCE/Pocket, etc, it was an extremely bad UI paradigm for a phone and a button free design in this case made it worse, not better and no one copied that especially not after the iPhone was announced and shown.
The last iteration of Windows Phone (eg: Metro) was actually quite good, but wouldn’t have existed without iPhone/Android before it. It being more like iPhone wasn’t what hurt it, what hurt it was that they never got the dev support needed. My wife had a Windows phone for around a year, and the thing that ultimately moved her to iPhone wasn’t that she didn’t like the phone, it was that she was constantly left out of things because it was probably more rare for an app to hit Windows Phone than Linux.
Microsoft did have the right idea with getting to mobile/tablets before most, but MS has never really had good taste when it comes to software UI.
Part of their issue is their desktop and x86 legacy apps ecosystem was no use on ARM touch devices.
But more competition than 2 would have been nice. We need stuff to move back to mobile web apps instead of apps. Then it’s platform independence and the sandbox is interchangable.
There was also Windows CE, which was a real shitshow. I had a Vadem Clio, which I still wish I had because I was a beautiful piece of hardware… but it was so hampered by having Windows CE installed on it.
