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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Oct 2023
179 points (95.4% liked)
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I'm stunned with how bad it was and why they hell they didn't use the same strategy that made Windows popular.. The apps.
My work back then gave me a Windows Phone. Very few of the apps I had on my Android phone was available for my work phone.
On top of that a lot of things simply didn't work. One thing I still remember was that Alarm volume and Ring tone volume could not be adjusted individually.
The whole thing felt like they wanted to reinvent the wheel and started from absolute scratch without learning from the innovation in the past decade of mobile phones.
It's sad, a third competitor in the smartphone space wouldn't have been a bad thing.
They did try to do that, but there wasn't enough interest from companies to split their development teams to support a third platform. In fact Microsoft realised this and was so invested in it that they had a program where they would use MS devs to convert/build from scratch your iOS/Android app to run on Windows for free. All you had to do was take it over and maintain it after; almost no one took them up on it.
One of the clients I worked for had an interesting relationship with both Microsoft and BlackBerry at the time: both companies just outright paid them to build and maintain the Windows Phone and BlackBerry 10 apps, respectfully. Another agency did Windows Phone, but we billed them directly for the BlackBerry port of the Android app and its maintenance.
The industry just wasn't interested. It's too bad, the environment was excellent, and the phone was pretty slick. The HTC Sidekick will always be one of my favorite form factors for a phone.
There just wasn't any interest in supporting a 3rd platform for most major companies.
I worked at a fortune 50 when the phone release and developed an app for it. The company looked at it and said they didn't want to spend 50k to support it over the next year. The whole industry came to the same conclusion. Microsoft had to subsidize the 3rd party apps it got for the phone.
Lmao. Windows became popular because Apple was in shambles. Essentially they were the only game in town and literally because of that, overnight, they became THE operating system. Even with Jobs’ return and Apple’s meteoric rise, they were never able to even dent the monopoly they already built.
And they didn’t stop at personal computers. They innervated every business, post secondary institution, government sector and basically took over.
Microsoft is good at building and maintaining a monopoly. Outside of that, their actually products are third rate at best.