3 ms·

I don't think there is a single smoking gun- many things contributed to the downfall of Windows Phone. Microsoft had a decent market share with the old Windows

I don't think there is a single smoking gun- many things contributed to the downfall of Windows Phone. Microsoft had a decent market share with the old Windows CE based smart phones. - Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had ~42% marketshare in 2007) - Windows Phone 7 was great, but it was too late by then (2010... 3 years after iPhone was release and 2 years after first Android phone) - There were two resets (7 => 8, 8 => 10) which screwed customers hard. With the 7 => 8 upgrade, not only were apps incompatible, the OS was incompatible with previous hardware. - The App Store was mostly full of garbage apps (lots of fake apps- hard to fine the genuine app) - Carriers didn't do a very good job pushing Windows Phone (can you blame them? :P ) From my perspective (former WP user, 2011 - 2015), the biggest WTF to me was when Microsoft bought Nokia. That seems to be about the time they just completely gave up

pjmlp 9y ago
Actually three resets, 8 => 8.1 was also a kind of reset with the introduction of universal apps.
- bsclifton 9y ago
  That's a great point- while consumers may not have been affected by this heavily, developers had to update their apps. Lots of companies just stopped supporting their apps rather than invest time updating
digi_owl 9y ago
> - Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had ~42% marketshare in 2007) This was perhaps the big one. The CE/PocketPC lineage had been going since the 90s, but Phone 7 was a sharp break with that. Thus existing users knew they were hosed, and so no longer had a reason to be loyal to MS. It is weird seeing MS forgo their biggest trump card in this way. Their continued grip on a market has been thanks to backwards compatibility. Yet they squandered that on mobile, and seems poised to squander it on desktop as well.
distances 9y ago
> Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had ~42% marketshare in 2007) Are you taking about US market? I don't think they ever exceeded 15% globally.

pjmlp 9y ago

Actually three resets, 8 => 8.1 was also a kind of reset with the introduction of universal apps.

bsclifton 9y ago
That's a great point- while consumers may not have been affected by this heavily, developers had to update their apps. Lots of companies just stopped supporting their apps rather than invest time updating

digi_owl 9y ago

> - Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had ~42% marketshare in 2007) This was perhaps the big one. The CE/PocketPC lineage had been going since the 90s, but Phone 7 was a sharp break with that. Thus existing users knew they were hosed, and so no longer had a reason to be loyal to MS. It is weird seeing MS forgo their biggest trump card in this way. Their continued grip on a market has been thanks to backwards compatibility. Yet they squandered that on mobile, and seems poised to squander it on desktop as well.

distances 9y ago

> Microsoft didn't care about mobile, thinking Windows CE was fine (they had ~42% marketshare in 2007) Are you taking about US market? I don't think they ever exceeded 15% globally.