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Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile

• Zhyl 9y ago
  This isn't surprising, really. Windows Phone has been poorly for a long time. While I understand Microsoft's efforts at trying to approach the mobile space, it does seem that it's often at the expense of their core product - very similar to how Google nearly crippled their core offering by integrating everything with Google+. I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks.
  • richardwhiuk 9y ago
    Windows is extremely well sunk into the enterprise market, and neither Linux nor Mac are at all focusing sufficiently on it to displace them. Linux isn't user friendly enough, and Mac's support policy is a complete no go for enterprise.
    • brianwawok 9y ago
      Every enterprise I have worked at had both linux and mac available to developers. Is this not your experience? You seem to present as truth the opposite of what I have lived.
      • blackoil 9y ago
        Developers make a very small percentage of overall enterprise market.
      • jeff_petersen 9y ago
        In my (bigcorp) experience, its all windows all the way with macs available only to developers who have a need (iOS dev usually). And don’t forget that developers are a tiny minority of employees.
        • megaman22 9y ago
          As seemingly ubiquitous as Macbooks are, their market share has never really budged. It's been 3-5% for the entirety of the OS X era.
          • jorvi 9y ago
            That's because there has never been a <$999 MacBook. If you purely start to look at the Ultrabook segment then MacBooks have an absolutely staggering market share.
            • pjmlp 9y ago
              I seldom see any Macs around in most southern European countries, but I do see ultrabook PCs running Windows like the Asus ones.
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        I never worked on an enterprise with GNU/Linux worstations on their IT policy, on some companies IT tolerated rebel developers provided they took care 100% of integration issues with the company network and official tools. Macs are usually only available to upper management, unless required for iOS development, in which case they are part of a pool shared among project teams.
      • dagw 9y ago
        Is this not your experience? Not at all. Linux can sometimes be made available on servers if necessary, but if you want Linux on your desktop you have to use a VM (ideally without telling IT). Never worked at a large place where Macs where readily available. Macs used to be more popular ~10 years ago or so with the marketing and communications people doing a lot of DTP and design work, but even that seems to have greatly decreased.
        • jmkni 9y ago
          In my experience, it’s depressingly common for companies to have one single Mac that they dust off once a year to test something in Safari.
      • MagnumOpus 9y ago
        "Developers" are a miniscule share of "enterprise". We are talking about the billion computers on corporate office workers' desks, not about the maybe-a-million computers of web/network/systems developers. Counter-anecdote: every place I worked at including 4-5 major companies in various industries had compulsory windows desktops for everyone. The few of us that also had a Linux (or AIX/HP-UX/...) machines that we did our work on, SSHd into those machines.
      • EpicEng 9y ago
        What OS were the other 98% (i.e. non-devs) of employees using?
        • herbst 9y ago
          Usually Mac in my experience because nobody on their right mind would bother with Windows in a working environment.
          • chrisper 9y ago
            Except people who do .NET development, no? I wish I could use Linux, but I can't since I am working on WPF stuff.
          • EpicEng 9y ago
            Then I guess the vast majority of people are insane because Mac use in Enterprise is essentially non-existent.
            • herbst 9y ago
              To be fair in my limited experience it is true. I live and work and Switzerland, the majority of customers i faced with, i.e. medium to bigger companies, universities and gov agencies all used Macs. I travelled as Digitalnomad, and went to plenty meetups around Startups, Entrepreneurship and other not 100% tech things. Clear mac dominance as well. However i work with Rails, Python and fancy things. I know if i would look into .NET/suit wearing side of things, things would look very different.
    • herbst 9y ago
      If a Ubuntu in 2017 isn't user friendly I really don't know what that phrase is even supposed to mean.
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        I lost access to my netbook $HOME, when Ubuntu just refused to acknowledge the existence the file system after freezing in X. It required a boot direct into the GRUB root console and running fsck from there. Not something that regular macOS and Windows users expect as user friendly.
        • hollander 9y ago
          I've helped people who lost access to their Windows 7 home directory. It didn't mean they ended up in commandline mode, but it meant their home folder was recreated from scratch. Many things didn't work anymore. I bet 99% of Windows users can't solve that by themselves. I don't see any difference with your problem. The problem you describe is bad as you can't use the computer at all, while my problem created a false illusion that the home folder was OK as it was still there. That the old one was renamed, made invisible, and then the new one got the old name - didn't help at all.
      • isolli 9y ago
        Just one example: every few weeks I need to manually remove old images as described here [0], otherwise security updates won't be installed. Four versions and four years later, it's still not fixed. [0] https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-space-when-upgrading https://askubuntu.com/questions/298487/not-enough-free-disk-...
      • OoooooooO 9y ago
        Ubuntu did not enable the energy saving options by default on my notebook and did not install the wifi drivers out of the box. Which was a "bit" painful because the office is wifi only and getting online then is impossible. Had to hunt down the driver, put it on a stick and install them. Never again. And the laptop was 5+ years old ...
      • 9y ago
  • yoz-y 9y ago
    They have a lot going for them in the desktop market still. Apple targets only the high end market (at least in terms of prices), Chromebooks come with a set of constraints that many can not overcome.
  • keypress 9y ago
    Partner has a Chromebook, and it's really rough around the edges. 'Simple' things like file management/association is a pain. And it's been pretty buggy. Vanilla OS with no 3rd party plugins. If the OS is neglected and not matured it could easily go the same way.
  • coldtea 9y ago
    >I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks. It's simple: Chromebooks are crippled by the mostly-web concept and Macbooks only cater to (a part of) the more affluent end of the market.
    • mark-r 9y ago
      I worked in IT support for a while, and saw that many business apps are expected to come with a browser interface now. If companies could be weaned from their dependence on Office then Chromebooks would take off. Eliminating the support issues for Windows would be a big deal.
• mmsimanga 9y ago
  Sad news. I have a Nokia Windows 8.1 phone. Battery life is excellent for a smart phone. Build quality is great including quality of camera. Apps are the only missing feature. Sad all the expertise Nokia built up over the years has come to nought.
  • roryisok 9y ago
    I'm also still using my Lumia 925 as my main phone. And despite this news I'm still thinking about buying a newer one, second hand. Every time I use android or IOS I miss tiles, pinning, the super clean settings
• lgbr 9y ago
  The existence of Windows Phone was one of the more confusing efforts in the professional world. Microsoft had released an OS that, while itself was a capable OS, the ecosystem around it was unacceptable. The availability of apps was terrible, and those that were there were often not kept up to the standard that iOS and Android apps were. Still, a lot of people bought them at work because of concerns over compatibility with Exchange or the rest of their Microsoft ecosystem. They've all slowly had to learn that Microsoft isn't as omnipresent as it once was, and have had to buy new devices and learn a new OS all over again. Microsoft really should have killed this sooner and saved everyone the headache.
• melling 9y ago
  “Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has argued that the company isn't out of the mobile hardware business, insisting that its HoloLens augmented reality headset is a mobile device.” I hope the rest of the industry remains paranoid. Nadella does have a point. Mobile will evolve and in 5-10 years, watches, glasses, etc could usurp a significant share of the mobile phone market. It can be easier to claim a new market rather than take an established one. Windows is still close to 90% of the desktop makes share, but it matters a lot less today.
  • WorldMaker 9y ago
    This is partly why I've not put much stock into "Surface Phone" rumors, but am listening for whatever fascinating tidbits I can hear from the rumor mills of a "HoloPhone".
• FussyZeus 9y ago
  It's a shame but it's not surprising. I loved my Lumia Icon way back, but even then the lack of apps from all but the biggest players was eventually a dealbreaker. I went to iPhone personally, I like the similar build quality and the heft to the devices is nice. Honestly I'll never understand why MS even went into the mobile space, what with having two enormous and well entrenched competitors (not that I'm saying only having two is a good thing overall, but you know) and coming into the game so very, very late compared to them. Windows Phone was doomed from the start I think, just by market forces, not even going into the faults with the product itself.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Microsoft was already on the mobile space before Apple or Google even thought about writing a mobile OS. They just failed to properly capitalize on that. In Europe we only had Symbian and Windows CE handsets to choose from.
• nu5500 9y ago
  It should also be noted that W10 Mobile was a slow running, bug ridden mess when it was released and took well over a year to become usable. It was also not compatible with most of the existing Windows Phone handsets in use, and at the same time, Microsoft killed off their phone hardware (nothing released since 2015) and pulled them out of stores. So anywhere that Windows phones were gaining traction in were guaranteed to be short lived.
• coldtea 9y ago
  >Microsoft has told its die-hard Windows 10 Mobile fans All 5 of them?
  • buddapalm 9y ago
    It's at least 5X larger than that. ;)
    • huffpopo 9y ago
      There are literally dozens of us.
• holydude 9y ago
  Well Windows phone was just different. And being different does not always mean being the best. Windows on mobile should have been more modular when it came to looks. Enforcing tiles on mobile when people were used to traditional icons on screen was a terrible decision. I am not going to write about the other issues like incompatibilities , lack of apps and other chicken and egg problems. You can experiment when you have the user base and even then you need to be super careful.
• madmulita 9y ago
  Oh boy, Nokia's gonna be pissed!
• pjmlp 9y ago
  Quite sad how WinDev torpedo the WP7 efforts with the WP reboots (WP 8, WP 8.1, UWP). For quite some time WP was the best developer experience between iOS, Android and WP, regarding tooling and available SDK programming languages.
• nocoder 9y ago
  I still remember one of the first HTC phones which had a mobile version of I think windows xp. The phone came with a stylus and the windows felt like a miniaturized version of desktop. This improved significantly in the Lumia series, the UI was good and easy to use. But by then the app ecosystem had already built strongly around android and ios so there was not much traction. I feel microsoft lost the ecosystem battle rather than OS. With too big app stores, the developers did not have much appetite for supporting another ecosystem which was very small.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    What? Windows CE is older than Android.
• blackoil 9y ago
  I was using WP since times of WP 7 and Lumia 710. At that time other options were either super costly iPhone or crappy lagging Android. WP had a fresh look, smooth OS and range of hardware from Nokia. Unfortunately, MS fumbled couple of times with internals while moving to WP 8 and WM 10. In the meanwhile Android fixed the kinks and improved UI. Motorola and Xiaomi improved value for money of Android.
  • herbst 9y ago
    Pretty sure we talk about the same time nexus 3 and 4 were a thing. In that case Android was far from Laggy already. Hardware producers just still fucked everything in their software up
  • maaaats 9y ago
    Yeah, a $80-$100 Nokia ran as smoothly as an expensive Android at that time.
    • vetinari 9y ago
      You may think it ran as smoothly, but it certainly didn't do as much. Lumia 520 and Moto G were almost identical hardware (almost same CPU, same GPU, Moto G had double RAM and 720p display, Lumia only 800x480), for similar price, but the Moto G was way better device, that did stuff people wanted.
• naikrovek 9y ago
  This doesn't mean anything, to me. I just read "Windows 10 Mobile as a standalone OS is going away." Remember that Windows OneCore is a thing, and that Windows on Arm is a thing. They are eliminating all the "one-off" operating systems and consolidating all of the features into OneCore. I am not pining for Windows Mobile (despite owning several throughout the past decade) I just think that Windows OneCore will make Windows available on phones again if Microsoft ever have a good reason to enter the mobile market again.
  • pjmlp 9y ago
    Might be, but given how they managed the whole story, they will get UWP apps that work by accident on phones. Just like Google and Apple get phone apps that work by accident on tablets, but feel out of place otherwise.
    • WorldMaker 9y ago
      UWP apps that work by accident on phones is not a bad strategy, though. Good application design is responsive, same reason responsive became a huge buzzword in web dev. Even if you are just designing with Desktop in mind: there are hundreds of combinations of monitor resolutions and DPI settings, and everyone has their own personal preferences for how they arrange applications on those monitors. Windows apps have always been resizable and there are always people that will want to shrink app windows to tiny phone sizes while they work on other things.
    • naikrovek 9y ago
      what do you mean "by accident?" UWP works across Windows 10 platforms by design.
      • pjmlp 9y ago
        Just because UWP targets all Windows 10 platforms, it doesn't mean a developer will take all of them into account. Currently most UWP developers only care about desktop as target platform, so if it happens to work and be a good UI/UX in a e.g. 7" display it will be by accident. One needs to take responsive design and API contracts into account, to make a good UI/UX across all supported platforms.
• itsmenotyou 9y ago
  I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base. Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.
  • cm2187 9y ago
    I remember they started by introducing the same sort of toll than Apple. That was them shooting themselves in the foot.
    • dhimes 9y ago
      This is what I thought too. If they're also going to charge in the ballpark of 30%, then they're not serious. They're not giving the proper incentive.
  • aloisdg 9y ago
    I used to be a MSP from Mango to WP8.1. I will always be impress by everything MS did for devs and students. If you have the will to build an app, you could have, to help you, free licenses, free marketplace, free phone and tablet to test, free ms dev time to help you, free commercial time to help you share you app, free press coverage, free conferences, etc. They did so much, sometimes I felt impostor to don't do more. So much money was here to support.
  • nathantotten 9y ago
    This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement of that app and other flagship apps was not a core focus. Work was outsourced and not given enough resources. Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. From my prospective the focus was on filling the store with apps regardless of quality. This convinced the first generation of Microsoft loyalists to buy Windows Phones, but turned off many of those people. Most would not go on to buy a second WP or recommend them to friends and family. This includes many (dare I say most) Microsoft employees who where enthusiastic about the product at first, but when it came time to buy a second or third device moved on to Android or iPhone.
• dep_b 9y ago
  This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different .Net versions that are out there and what they mean from the top of their heads.
  • cm2187 9y ago
    As a punishment, the .net framework owners should be forced to learn and recite by heart the .net standard compatibility matrix!
    • oblio 9y ago
      That's just part of growing pains. I imagine that when Microsoft finishes their long term plan for .NET the layers will basically be: .NET Core - implements .NET Standard. Everything else is layered on top of .NET Core: .NET Framework (Windows), Xamarin (Linux, MacOS GUI, Android, iOS). So basically everything in use will support .NET Standard. Retconning is a bitch :p
  • jmkni 9y ago
    It looks like WPF will be supported for the forseeable future, but I get your overall point
    • frik 9y ago
      WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.
      • garganzol 9y ago
        .NET Core 2 comes very close to the full .NET Framework. Microsoft just made a full circle. Everything legacy is the hot new thing again.
• ryl00 9y ago
  Back when Microsoft started started throwing in the towel and put their phones on fire sale I loaded up on $30 Lumia 640's (how could you not at that price for a 5" LTE in 2015?) They've served me and my family well since. The lack of apps has a flip side... I'm not terrible worried about malware. ;) And I'm not worried about my kids getting too distracted by all the games, etc available on iOS/Android.
  • TLLtchvL8KZ 9y ago
    I picked up a Lumia 535 cheap mid/late 2015 and am still using it today, with W10, like a dream. I love how simple it is compared to when I see family members and they throw their phone at me wanting me to have a look at it to fix something. I spend 2 hours yesterday morning trying to get screenshots off of my mothers Samsung galaxy something-or-other android phone and the thing is just a complete mess, photos stored in 3 separate places, some pictures in one place but not another, some available but when trying to BT to me her phone "cant fetch" the photos.. I almost had a breakdown. She also had a malware problem about half a year ago where when she turned on wifi it was uploading for hours sucking up the entire internet connection and my brother couldn't play his online games. Could not find out what was uploading or where it was uploading to but it required a complete reset. Even when working correctly she cant do tasks because she is at times bombarded with notifications from apps that fill her screen up and just seem to stress her out. Problems like this are common with my family and mother unfortunately, she had a windows phone (back when it was Nokia making them) and never had issues apart from "lack of apps" which is why she switched when her contract allowed. Hope you enjoyed my rant/blog-post.
  • christophilus 9y ago
    I loved WP back when I used it. It got out of my way. Its auto-complete was better than anything I'd used before or since (though a friend has it, and he says this has degraded over time?) Anyway, I use Android now because of Republic Wireless. It is a real shame that Android took off instead of WP.
  • bluedino 9y ago
    >> The lack of apps has a flip side... I'm not terrible worried about malware. ;) Is this something people should be worried about on a phone?
• pritambarhate 9y ago
  One cool move on Microsoft's part can be releasing Microsoft's version of Android. The main problem is Google Play Services. But since MS almost has parallel offerings for all Google Services they can create an "API" compatible version of Google Play services. This way users will be able to install all the current Android applications which are available on Play Store. This can convert Android into an Oligopoly instead of Google's Monopoly.
  • fetbaffe 9y ago
    Microsoft is cooperating with Cyanogen OS https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/22/11092050/cyanogen-microsoft-android-apps-integration https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/22/11092050/cyanogen-microso...
    • hadrien01 9y ago
      CyanogenOS doesn't exist anymore. But they're selling a Galaxy S8 Microsoft Edition with included Microsoft apps.
      • fetbaffe 9y ago
        I thought it was CyanogenMod that doesn't exist anymore?
        • aloisdg 9y ago
          Most of the community move to Lineage
        • fetbaffe 9y ago
          Okay, seems that both CyanogenMod and Cyanogen OS are dead, I thought it was only one of them. So Microsoft did another miscalculation on that one. It seems likely that Microsoft continues to push into Android with all things it releases for it. But how will they make money on that? Seems unclear.
  • camus2 9y ago
• frik 9y ago
  Windows Mobile 6 (2007, CE based) was pretty good. iPhone changed everything. Then Microsoft destroyed v6 with Windows Mobile 7 (CE based but incompatible to CE apps, Silverlight-only apps) Windows Mobile 7 got replaced by incompatible Windows Phone 8. Windows Mobile 8 got replaced by incompatible Windows Phone 10. Microsoft finally admits Windows Phone/Mobile 10 is dead. More on the "burning platform memo" of their infamous Stephen Elop, and the $7.6 billion write down on the acquisition of Nokia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    There was no Windows mobile 7. It was already branded as Windows Phone 7 by then. They went back to Windows Mobile for 10, I think.
• amatheus 9y ago
  Where does this leave Windows Universal Development? Hardly Universal if it’s only for Windows 10 desktop. I’m no Windows nor Xbox user, but do people develop using Universal for both? Are there other platforms right now worth targeting for Windows Universal?
  • naikrovek 9y ago
    There's still HoloLens, Surface Hub, XBox, and IoT Core and Enterprise. My employer writes UWP apps for itself, because we have all of these devices (even XBox) and write UWP apps for them all (because with the exception of IoT Enterprise, they're all UWP-only.) IoT Mobile is still a SKU that Microsoft sell, by the way. Guess what IoT Mobile is? It's Windows Mobile. It isn't dead, it's just not getting new features. It'll be replaced by OneCore in the not too distant future, I imagine.
    • NiveaGeForce 9y ago
      UWP is getting new features all the time, it's the way forward for Windows apps and will stay for many years to come. Even all the default Windows 10 apps and stuff like settings UI are UWP. OneCore is an internal Windows refactor that won't affect users nor developers.
• fetbaffe 9y ago
  On what hardware platform does Microsoft earn money on? Xbox and keyboards? Will Microsoft go back to a pure software maker?
  • aloisdg 9y ago
    Surface
    • fetbaffe 9y ago
      Not sure if Microsoft has earned back it's investment on the Surface line yet. First years it was a big loss, then it has started to earn money, but it has started falling again. Compared to Xbox, Surface revenue is about a 25% of Xbox. Of total earnings Surface is about 3%.
  • toyg 9y ago
    With the right strategy, making money is not essential. Like Google with the Nexus a few years ago, MS needs only to build reference hardware to keep OEMs on the straight and narrow, then collect elsewhere (with preinstalled services or OS that OEMs end up distributing). The problem is that "elsewhere" is currently occupied by Google (in terms of ubiquity) and Apple (in terms of profit), so MS has been pushed into the uncomfortable role of luxury OEM, and there is no major money there regardless of whether you make phones or laptops.
• steverb 9y ago
  It feels inevitable, but it's still a shame. I think the Windows Mobile interface was the most functional of the mobile UIs. I switched to Android years ago, but I still miss it.
  • kageneko 9y ago
    After my dad had a stroke, he needed a new phone that he could use easily. We ended up with a Nokia using Windows Phone because the large tiles and keyboard buttons were something he could handle. The iOS and Android interfaces required more precision than he was able to do. To be fair, this was 5 or so years ago and I didn't delve very far into accessibility settings for anything. WP worked fine out of the box, though.
• shadowmint 9y ago
  This surprises no one. I'm more interested in: what's the future for UWP apps now? Another dead end like silverlight? A cross platform UI library that runs on .Net core (ie. windows, mac, linux, android, ios), some kind of hybrid of ??? and Xamarin forms could potentially be quite a nice tool... but its pretty hard to be excited about the prospect with their track record of killed off UI frameworks so far.
  • FLGMwt 9y ago
    I think it has a little more hope with XBOX One support.
  • Klathmon 9y ago
    Well the Xbox is still a UWP target, so there are still multiple platforms that use it. Also I wouldn't be surprised if we see microsoft make a push to allow UWP to target Android.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    UWP apps wouldn't be so bad for Windows if maybe Microsoft extended their functionality a little and kept improving their performance. However, what scares me to death as a user is that if UWP is let's say super-popular with developers 5-10 years from now, and everyone builds their apps as UWP apps for Windows, then Microsoft will eventually restrict "normal" users (read: most "consumer" Windows machines) from even side-loading apps from outside of the store. If that's something that has even crossed the minds of Microsoft's leadership, then I definitely don't want UWP to gain any sort of real traction. And I'd rather see Microsoft improve user security through instant virtualization for apps, like what they're doing with App Guard for Edge, even if it's only an option users could choose, and not something that works by default for most or all apps.
    • deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    • vetinari 9y ago
      Exactly that was the original intent with Metro apps. For developers, Visual Studio was able to provision keys (online), but otherwise you had to be inside AD domain, or have the Enterprise SKU and "sideloading key". Only with Windows 10 it became possible to sideload non-win32 apps.
• baldfat 9y ago
  Technically was good perhaps even better platform than iOS and Android. To Late To Market
• dang 9y ago
  Url changed to this (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15433098 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15433098) from http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-mobile-microsoft-just-put-the-final-nail-in-the-coffin/ http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-mobile-microsoft-jus..., a slightly less substantive article.
• mtgx 9y ago
  That was kind of obvious a year or two ago when Microsoft gutted 99% of the Nokia division.
• 201709User 9y ago
  At least they did it with a tweet. It's a sign of respect, right?
• michaelbuckbee 9y ago
  Windows Mobile is my favorite example of ecosystems being more valuable than individual user experiences. They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS. But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing. So far we've seen: - Amazon fail - Microsoft fail - Facebook fail (killed internally) All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance. What I see are all the big players lining up to take a crack at Augmented Reality when the tech hits a sweet spot sometime in the next 5-10 years. That's the reason for the crazy investments in MagicLeap, etc. it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    WeChat has done that to some degree. Given that WeChat is basically a platform at this point, one could imagine a WeChat phone coming out in china, bypassing Android completely. Not sure what would be the point though.
    • wodenokoto 9y ago
      A wechat phone would be obvious and I don't know why they don't do it. Remember that Google play and all the other play services are not available in China.
      • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
        I think google play is a available, just nothing else is. Anyways, there are plenty of alternatives. https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-Play-in-China-function https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-Play-in-China-function
      • woodada 9y ago
        Because not having Play Store != not running Android apps. People's games and other apps still need Android to run. A non-Android Wechat phone would fail for the same reason Windows phones did -- no apps.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• pier25 9y ago
  I don't think the problem was primarily the lack of apps but a major reason to use Windows mobile. With iOS you get the high end hardware and deep integration with Apple's ecosystem. With Android you get deep integration with Google's services and a wide range of devices in prices and features. What did you get with Windows mobile?
  • isolli 9y ago
    You got high-quality cameras on Nokia Lumia phones. Which apparently was not enough...
  • criddell 9y ago
    > What did you get with Windows mobile? From a consumer point of view, not much. There's a lot there for businesses though. If you employ a bunch of .Net developers for your in-house applications, Windows Mobile is a pretty natural way get a mobile app developed.
    • evilduck 9y ago
      The problem there is that a business has employees and those employees don't want to own Windows Phones personally and at the same time businesses don't want to provide each employee a company phone either.
    • unsignedint 9y ago
      But then, if there are bunch of .NET developers, there's Xamarin.
  • MBCook 9y ago
    I think that was the idea of Nokia. You get high end hardware with MS services. But MS services weren’t as good years ago, and they didn’t have many apps, and they kept burning people by not letting them upgrade to a new major OS release.
  • JamesBarney 9y ago
    Performance at a low price point. I mentioned this elsewhere but when I was using a Windows phone, I'd buy $30-$50 windows phones and love them. When I eventually made the switch to a $40 Android phone is was borderline unusable so I had to pay for $300 Nexus.
• ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  Joe Belfiore wholly missed the problem. Microsoft didn't need apps. Most people using Windows Mobile had enough apps. But the last Verizon phone which could run Windows came out three years ago. People left Windows because they didn't have any options. Had Microsoft kept Nokia intact, even in a reduced size state, Windows Mobile would probably still have it's 5% or so market share.
• samfisher83 9y ago
  While WM was clunky at least you could run any random piece of software you wanted. Then Microsoft tried to copy apple. I think if they had put a relatively open OS and sold highend phones for $200-300 bucks I think they could have made it. They probably would have had to sink billions and billions, but they could have done it. Look at Xbox its viable platform today.
  • WorldMaker 9y ago
    You can sideload applications in Windows 10 mobile easily enough. Like Android it's been on by default for some time and just a matter of downloading an .appx package file. The ability to sideload doesn't help if there aren't apps to sideload. I don't think the problem was ever the openness of the platform. An open platform doesn't guarantee developers either (look at decades of people not support Linux ports of their applications as an obvious example).
    • garganzol 9y ago
      The problem with sideloading is that it requires a lot of hops. So many hops nobody does this. Usually "a hop" is represented by some required certificate, a special "container" the app needs to follow, a special API voodoo call you should make to sideload the app. It quickly decays from being a reliable reproducible computer science, and turns into the joke of marketing greed you would never trust.
      • WorldMaker 9y ago
        From a user experience standpoint: sideloading is just "install this app". Click a link on a website to an APK for Android or APPX for Windows and watch it install. It doesn't get much easier than that. Fewer hurdles and security concerns than installing some random EXE that may be a wrapper for an MSI and needs Administrator rights to your machine for who knows what reason. The install experience for an APPX link is really nice in Windows these days. It's a great user experience. From a developer standpoint: those "hops" have been your job for decades. Complaining about them says more about whether or not you are good at your job than the platform itself is suitable to applications. Windows has always encouraged executable signing, and downloading unsigned EXEs from random websites has always been a bad idea. (The SmartScreen warnings for them these days have become appropriately diresome.) Other platforms have signing requirements, too. Containers have always existed: ZIP, CAB, MSI, etc. If I was forced to write a container by hand-formed scripts, the APPX format is much easier than MSI or most other installer packages for classic Windows desktop: it's a zip file with a pretty easy to read XML manifest. (With the Desktop Bridge, no application developers have an excuse to use an EXE or MSI installer anymore if they are only supporting Windows 10. If you can build an EXE or MSI, you can build an APPX. Build an APPX.) There's no special voodoo API calls needed to sideload an app on Windows. Users just double-click an APPX package and magic happens [since the Anniversary Update in November of last year], they get a simple installer dialog. (You can use PowerShell to automate installing APPX packages, but you don't have to. It's an advantage to power users, not voodoo to pass to normal users.) As for "reproducible"? APPX installs are way more reproducible than EXE/MSI installs. It's a pretty slick system if you bother to look under the hood. It's also rather well documented in that case that you do. I can't assuage any conspiracy theories about marketing greed, but looking at sideloading from a technical perspective, it certainly isn't "a lot of hops" and "nobody does this" is a matter of perspective; I've got several packages in development that currently are outside of the Windows Store.
• JTenerife 9y ago
  I remember when they tried to push the first version of Windows Phone out of the gates. I think it was 2008 or 2009. Then - as to be expected with that ambitious projects - they already had big delays. What happened then is a good example of how big companies seem to have problems taking the necessary radical steps when projects don't perform. I've experienced this at my employee. Only that the project I have in mind is more than 10 years heavily underperforming while spending easily over a billion dollars. Microsoft seemed to let the Windows Phone project keep going pretty much the same way as it started ... same project lead, probably a lot of the same people. What happens than typically is that good people don't work on this kind of projects. Then the whole Nokia mess ... what a sad story. I remember when I finally gave up any hope for Windows Phone: It was when I read that Samsung and HTC ought to pay license fee to Microsoft. That was probably the biggest mistake in Microsoft's history. They should have payed them 50 $ per sold Smartphone with Windows Phone on it. Anyway - I still have a Windows Phone from my employee and like it.
• DrBazza 9y ago
  What Microsoft did wrong: charge for the OS, and then rewrite it. I had a Samsung Omnia 7, and it was still the best phone I've had, in the sense that the UI was fast, obvious, and well thought out. Then they brought out Windows 8 mobile. And abandoned all hardware that ran Windows 7 mobile. And messed around with a working UI and broke the 'experience' (ghastly buzzword). And all the while, trying to fight Android which was free, and Apple that just has a cult of users that will buy the new phone regardless.
• Accacin 9y ago
  Sad. I used to a have a Nokia 1520 and it was a great phone. However, there were a few things that eventually just made me switch to an iPhone.
• DoodleBuggy 9y ago
  This is very disappointing. Apple and Google needed the competition.
• chx 9y ago
  Great. But the "unified UI" lead to touchscreens which are now a staple on laptops and they won't go away alas :(
• mariushn 9y ago
  Microsoft, please invest instead in https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8/ https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8/ so that you cut into your competitors cash cows, even if you don't have a profit. Just like Google did to you with Google Docs, cutting into MS Office. This way, you'd at least have a voice on mobile, instead of fully out.
• TYPE_FASTER 9y ago
  They've given up on being a mobile OS provider, I think, at least for now. I wonder if the announcement that they got the Win 10 kernel to compile on ARM is more geared at laptops/tablets than phones. What I haven't seen reported is Win 6.X had a large enterprise/industrial user base that now is going to have to choose between Android and iOS. It's interesting that the size of that existing customer base is small enough, compared to the consumer market, that it's not worth Microsoft's efforts to keep the industrial mobile OS product going.
• rbanffy 9y ago
  > Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile Who didn't? Seriously, nobody actually expected it to win over either iOS or Android.
• probably_wrong 9y ago
  I wanted to develop for Windows Phone, I really did. I even bought two phones, hoping that my experience with the first one would be fixed with the second. But I just couldn't: getting the environment to work required me to upgrade my version of Visual Studio, upgrade my version of the OS, pay a developer fee (or send an e-mail with a scan of my ID and grade transcript to get it waived as a student). And even after sorting all those obstacles, the IDE was so buggy that I couldn't even place a date picker object. The impression I got was: you can develop for WP, as long as you do it the way we like it (OS version, Visual Studio version) and invest about a hundred dollars getting up to spec. Compared to Android's "here's the free IDE for your OS of choice", I'm not surprised developers weren't thrilled.
  • binthere 9y ago
    But that's how development for iOS is too, probably even worse because you also need to buy the whole computer in order to develop in it (I know there are other ways, I'm just considering the way most developers do). But this model still successfully works for Apple. Developing for Android is really amazing. But the real deal is the phone's market share. It doesn't matter much how good or crap is your experience creating apps for a specific platform. At the end of the day it's about how many users will be downloading your app. Apple and Android has the market. Windows does not have it.
• cjsuk 9y ago
  I see a lot of people going on about incentives. Actually the simple problem is that MSFT know how to effectively fuck up a product: 1. Schizophrenic product direction. 2. Entire platform change half way through. 3. Quality control issues galore. 4. Regional issues galore. 5. Reinventing wheels, badly. It's just crap. That's happening to windows 10 too. It's just not quite as far down the toilet.
  • blauditore 9y ago
    I think part of the problem is that they actually try to push innovation (e.g. new UI paradigms with Metro), but then run into several vocal minorities, backtrack a bit and try to find a middle ground. From the outside, it then looks like a random zig-zag course, but it's much more an iterative minimization of "mean square pain" among their fairly large user base. Communication could often be better though.
    • cjsuk 9y ago
      I think it's more that they hire personalities and form personality cults. Personality cults can't be seen to fail by investors due to the CYA culture so they just burn off a cliff and explode when they hit the bottom of the ravine.
• gressquel 9y ago
  Windows phone didnt fail because of Microsofts efforts, it failed because of other companies efforts. Let me name some of them: Instagram (fb), facebook, Snapchat. Especially the last one has an agenda.
• fa17 9y ago
  MS has gotten really good with hardware off late. Why not a Surface phone with Stock android and regular updates? If it works out, gives MS a platform to try different services like Samsung with bixby etc.
• perseusprime11 9y ago
  The lack of a Youtube App from Google killed the Windows Phone. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/ https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/
  • roryisok 9y ago
    definitely helped. MS put a lot of effort into building a slick YouTube app and Google changed the T&Cs the week after it launched or something. Basically issued a takedown of the MS app because it didn't conform to the new standard they'd just introduced. I believe it was that third party apps had to allow ads, even though the iOS and Android apps did not.
    • bitmapbrother 9y ago
      Naw, you have it all wrong. They reversed engineered the YouTube API's and then suppressed YouTube ads. They deserved what they got for doing something that stupid and not thinking Google wouldn't find out.
      • roryisok 9y ago
        have you got a link to the original story? I really thought they were following the T&Cs and then those T&Cs were changed within days
        • bitmapbrother 9y ago
          https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-battle-over-youtube-windows-phone https://www.theverge.com/2013/8/16/4627342/microsoft-google-...
• Grom_PE 9y ago
  If only I could properly reprogram this WP8.1 phone I have here, it would've been much more interesting. But rooting/jailbreaking (in WP world called "Interop unlock") has always been awkward and possible only for the most popular types of WP: Lumia, Samsung. To write programs, it requires me to install Windows 8 or 10 — can't do with Windows 7 or Linux. Even if I write a program, this phone requires special developer unlocking online for "sideloading" two apps maximum at a time, another arbitrary awkward limitation which can be circumvented by shuffling around with an SD card: loading an app into phone, moving the app to SD, disconnecting the SD, loading another app and so on. WP8.1 does have an ability to install an app from a file directly, but only if it is signed with special enterprise signature, and that isn't cheap. Of browsers, only IE and IE-based browsers exist for WP, and that means no proper customization and of course no ad blocking. So the platform looked quite hostile to me and I wasn't motivated to explore any further.
  • garganzol 9y ago
    And then those MBA types are wondering why their "business strategy" is not working. The same applies to the Windows Store on Desktop. All that walled garden nonsense they are trying to impose is not going to work. The only thing I could seriously recommend to those clerks is to eat their neckties and finally become living human beings.
    • pjc50 9y ago
      > All that walled garden nonsense they are trying to impose is not going to work It seems to "work" for Apple, unfortunately. I can't see any business giving up on the prospect of having a 30% cut of everyone else's software ...
      • garganzol 9y ago
        Not in the recent years. Apple Store on Mac suffered from a massive app makers exodus. App Store for mobile suffers from rampant freemium-ization. Don't forget about the heaps of legacy, no longer updated paid apps. Apple was able to sniff that smoke, so it made a lot of App Store improvements together with iPhone 8 release.
• myrandomcomment 9y ago
  When MS released the first version of Windows NT it was buggy as hell. Internal to MS they ran Banyan VINES. Bill ordered it to be ripped out and replaced with NT. It was a mess. All the coders in MS quickly started to fix all the stuff that effected them. NT 3.51 came out pretty quickly after and to be honest it was quiet good for the time. For as much money as they spent trying to get people to buy the phone or write apps, they could have given a phone to each employee and family member, told them they would pay for the cell service for a year. You do not have to take it but all other phones are banded from the office. Every app you submit you get X number of RSUs. Pretty sure all the needed apps would have turned up in that year.
  • garganzol 9y ago
    Love Bill. He was the type.
• ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  I loved the look of the tiles... but outside of that I never really understood the value proposition. It's great to have more competitors but did they ever really shoot for 1 key differentiation that would make people switch?
• rchaud 9y ago
  Had Microsoft's acquisition strategy been different, they could have significantly boosted WM's hopes. The lack of official apps for Whatsapp and Instagram on WP were user's biggest complaints by far. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014 for a combined total of $20 billion. In roughly the same period, Microsoft bought Skype, Minecraft and LinkedIn for a total of around $36 billion, the bulk of that accruing to LI's price. I get that MS is enterprise-focused, but those prices seem completely out of whack with what they actually got in value. Whatsapp, Google and Apple all offer built in video chat for consumers and LI's value to anyone outside of recruiting agencies is dubious.
  • throwaway613834 9y ago
    I'd completely forgotten that Microsoft had actually bought LinkedIn. Even though now I recall seeing the news, until you mentioned it I was thinking they just had a partnership or something going on.
  • mcny 9y ago
    > LI's value to anyone outside of recruiting agencies is dubious. This is exactly the reason why LinkedIn needed the acquisition. I agree with you that the $26B price tag makes no sense given that LinkedIn needed this deal more than Microsoft did. > The software giant will pay $196 a share - a premium of almost 50% to Friday's closing share price. http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36519766 http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36519766 https://archive.fo/SoaO6 https://archive.fo/SoaO6 I think Windows Mobile should have followed through with its bridges, particularly the Android Bridge that it unceremoniously burned. ref https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-project-astoria-bridge-porting-android-apps-windows-10-mobile https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-... https://archive.fo/qtqcK https://archive.fo/qtqcK
  • glenstein 9y ago
    I completely understand the acquisition of Skype which was the undisputed king of video chat in its prime. It has since languished for any number of reasons, (probably relating to Microsoft's management but I'm not sure). But I agree, a decent acquisition strategy could have done wonders for their ecosystem. Instead of constantly making and shutting down competitors to popular products, buy the popular ones. There was a time before now when Evernote would have been a nifty target, before they collapsed under their need to make money. There are plenty of amazing music platforms that people care about which aren't Groove.
• darkhorn 9y ago
  The webview in Windows Phone was I think Internet Explorer 10 or something like that. Thus we were unable to port our Sencha Touch 1.1.1 app to Windows Phone. Then we have tried to rewrite the app with Sencha Touch 2 but because it was time consuming my employer told me to work on other things.
• TazeTSchnitzel 9y ago
  This makes me really sad given Windows 10 Mobile had a desktop mode, Continuum, and Microsoft had x86-on-ARM emulation in development for Windows 10 laptops. Why they never put 2 and 2 together is beyond me.
• blackaspen 9y ago
  Wow. This is sad. Not surprising though. I'm disappointed that we're now stick with a mediocre duopoly of OSs now.
• dagaci 9y ago
  One of the biggest failures of windows mobile was constant abandonment and reset, + all the mobile developers and users from the pre-iphone days were simply dropped with no path to wp7, + the earliest and devs of wp7 were all dropped in favour of wp8, + MS execs then approved of a slightly less damaging strategy with 8 to Wp10 but at this time it was already too late Microsoft could not solve the app-gap problem because the problem was caused by a lack of trust.
  • garganzol 9y ago
    This. But wait, in order to further harmonize "cloud first mobile first experiences" they may be deeply pleased to announce one more important transition from UWP to OneCore.
    • NiveaGeForce 9y ago
      UWP is getting new features all the time, it's the way forward for Windows apps and will stay for many years to come. Even all the default Windows 10 apps and stuff like settings UI are UWP. OneCore is an internal Windows refactor that won't affect users nor developers.
• wdn 9y ago
  Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL. I really think the device were great. However, they made the fatal mistake on this, the price point. They priced the 950/950XL same as iPhone and Android flagship phones. Yes, I do understand the 950 and 950 XL have flagship hardware, however, you do not priced it as your phone is in high demand. If they priced the phones at 300, it would sell a lot more. Developers do not want to develop for an OS with no users. Not only the hardware price was bad. The fees to developer was also bad. If I recalled correctly, they also want to takes the same amount of fee as Apple and Google. If I was Microsoft, I would not charge developer any fees for 3 years just to get them on board.
  • dpark 9y ago
    > Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL. The hardware was never the problem. Lots of great devices shipped with Windows Phone. (Disclosure: Microsoft employee)
    • garganzol 9y ago
      At some point I looked for Windows Phone device with a decent audio output so I could enjoy my lossless paid subscription to services like Tidal. I wasn't able to select a Windows Phone. There were several models but none of it made an explicit accent on sound quality. As a last resort I looked to external DACs and it turned out that Windows Phone didn't support them either. I just went and bought a second hand iPhone 6 with a good discount. The sound quality I got from it was decent and I became a happy Apple customer one more time (had iPhone 4 and other Apple gears before). So a statement that the hardware was never the problem is a bit of a stretch. Everything accumulates pretty quickly and every detail has an impact.
      • dpark 9y ago
        The set of people interested in running external DACs for their phones is vanishingly small. I’m pretty sure that losing that market wasn’t what doomed Windows Phone. Regardless, my point wasn’t that the hardware was perfect for everyone or every use case. The point was that there were premium Windows Phone devices before the 950 showed up. The 950 arrived after the end state for Windows Phone was pretty obvious.
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• hitgeek 9y ago
  "incentivize app devs". as an early adopter I felt abandoned. I was all in on windows mobile around v7 and windows8. bought the flagship lumia phone and surface rt tablet. invested the time to develop some basic apps. 6 months later both platforms were basically discontinued with no upgrade path, so I abandoned it too. if microsoft had just made an enterprise successor to blackberry, instead of trying to make a consumer phone, they probably would have been more successful. once the platform had traction in enterprise, maybe they could of made the consumer jump.
  • chickenbane 9y ago
    Sorry you feel abandoned. However, as you say you are an early adopter you should recognize this is a strong (even likely?) possibility. Yes, if the platform you invest in early is a success you can reap many rewards. But the mobile OS market has killed many platforms, and even a successful company like Microsoft can't guarantee success. We can play what-ifs in hindsight, but it's not like Microsoft was late to the game. I remember Windows CE and Pocket PC. My guess (and hope) is for Microsoft to make an Android phone. They just announced a launcher, so fingers crossed!
• bootcat 9y ago
  If Microsoft can't make things happen, I am not sure who can ! They have money, influence, power and user base with personal computers and cloud, and still they failed !
• ngold 9y ago
  Apple was the 1st and got to dictate the terms of their walled garden. The told Adobe from day 1 to get lost with flash, but for a wall it had walls amazingly low for what had been tried in the past. And people lost their minds with excitement, except those pesky open source kids. Google looked around and said we want in but how? Get rid of the wall and let any carrier and everyone use it. All the carrier's saw they could never get to market as fast and cheap as this so they begrudgingly accepteded in the face of Iphone taking huge marketshare an growing. MS came late with an expensive phone, a walled garden and no software(but hey kid why don't you build some for me for free). What were they expecting? I guarantee that they would have loved to tie your phone to an Xbox live account and make you pay 15 a month to text. That was probably the end goal and they were trying to work backwards towards it.
  • mtgx 9y ago
    The saddest part of the story was that Nokia's amazing hardware division was lost because of this. Sure, Nokia made some classic innovator's dilemma errors, too, but they were still huge at the time Samsung got into Android (about 2x as big in phone market share). About a year or two later they decided to go with Windows Phone - the ever 2% OS of the mobile market, because it was "different". It was stupid, and also the final fatal mistake that Nokia made. It was clear Android was well on its way to become the "Windows" of smartphones, which meant, ironically, that WP would be relegated to being at best the macOS or Linux of the mobile market. Plus, Android already allowed OEMs to be "different". Nokia was basically making an argument for a "different ecosystem" at that point. But they should've known that it was too late to attract developers to a third ecosystem. Android had to fight hard to even reach more or less parity with the iOS ecosystem in terms of revenue for developers, even with its 5x larger market share. There was no hope WP would win in these conditions.
    • ngold 9y ago
      Eat the cost of the super phone. Make it super easy to use, develop and distribute. 5% or even flat appstore fee. Then maybe. They did it with the Xbox, but I think they got lucky with the timing on that one. This is like them releasing an 8bit console with no games and just as expensive. In 1988, when everyone already owned a Nintendo or Sega.
• pmontra 9y ago
  > We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs. Paid money.. wrote apps 4 them.. but volume of users is too low for most companies to invest. The problem is that no customer I knew was keen to have to pay for the same app three times. Android and iOS cost enough money. Windows Mobile only choice would be to overcome one of those two platforms quickly, but it started the race way too late. Everybody was hoping it died quickly. A market split evenly in 3 would be a budget nightmare. However let me say that only one platform would be unhealthy. Nothing good comes from mono cultures, as IE demonstrated after winning the browser wars some 15 years ago.
  • 201709User 9y ago
    Now we have two garbage GUIs without pressure to improve. More competition is better!
    • r00fus 9y ago
      Hey, PalmOS was there early and with a decent UI. But the hardware was not up to the task. It's really a pity that no one interested in mobile picked up Palm. HP - what did they do with it other than throw it away?
      • 201709User 9y ago
        HP did a cheap tablet give away :P.
• bolelang 9y ago
  It has been a slow death for Windows Mobile. To think that my very first smartphone was an HP Windows phone way before we even imagined that there will be something called Android.
• tweedledee 9y ago
  Does anyone actually make money on the app Store? Either Desktop or Mobile? I have a niche desktop app that I'm thinking about porting. It's probably a few weeks worth of work. The 30% cut might be tolerable if I can increase the sales.
  • tweedledee 9y ago
    Am I shadowbanned? I can't see my comment from another account.
    • executesorder66 9y ago
      I can see both your comments.
      • tweedledee 9y ago
        Thanks, I found out that there is a page fold on HN with 'more' at the bottom that I was previously unaware of.
• Illniyar 9y ago
  That's heartbreaking, they are two minutes away from singularity -a usable os that works on mobile, tablet and desktop. It's stupid to stop now, they managed to take on the iPad with surface, I'm sure a mobile success is possible.
• elkhourygeorges 9y ago
  Android released couple of months after the iPhone. Windows Phone couple of years later. This is it. Microsoft could have easily been the leading mobile platform.
  • freehunter 9y ago
    Microsoft was the leading mobile platform. They even had apps, real apps, desktop-caliber (for the time) apps. 10 years before the iPhone. Microsoft had the lead for a while and they got disrupted by a shinier, more consumer-friendly device. Their mistake was thinking that consumers didn't want a smartphone and aiming it at an enterprise market, like Blackberry. That "mistake" made them possibly billions of dollars over its life. Apple took a huge risk going in the opposite direction. It's easy to look back and realize Microsoft gave up a huge market segment, but at the time things were going well for them. Their only competitor back then (Palm) bet the company on trying to make the transition to compete with Apple and... well. We all know what happened there.
• liglesias 9y ago
  I could have told them almost a decade ago that the whole Microsoft mobile/phone thing was doomed from the very start. It's amazing to me that it was so obvious to me then, and yet the smartest highest-paid people at Microsoft couldn't figure it out. Unbelievable.
• ChicagoDave 9y ago
  As much as I loved Windows Phone (I bought 4 of them), the app development side was never mature enough to take seriously by most professionals. The support from Microsoft on the development side was pretty limited, outside of "hey, we're MS, you need to do this!" At the time, the Metro theme seemed like a novel and interesting idea. In hindsight, mimicking the UX of iOS (which is exactly what Android did), was the correct path. Had MS made the Windows Phone look exactly like iOS, but offered an easier app dev story, there _might_ have been a chance to grow their market share. But in reality, I doubt there is anything MS could have done to rebuild their mobile presence. Apple and Android are an unassailable juggernaut from a consumer's perspective and even I succumbed. After buying the Nokia 1020, which was a phenomenal piece of hardware, MS started tinkering with core apps like the calendar and email. There was this fanfare of purchasing third party apps and adapting them, but this was the deal-breaker for me. These two apps (which I installed with an early beta of Windows 10 Mobile) were simply horrible. They were menu oriented. Mobile phone apps shouldn't have menus. Period. Anytime you see a hamburger menu, you're looking at pure UX laziness. When the second update came through and I saw these apps get _worse_.... ...I walked out of work, walked the two blocks to the nearest AT&T store, threw the 1020 on the little round table and said, "iPhone 6plus, don't care about color or anything....and I rubber case"... That was nearly three years ago. I recently upgraded to the 7plus and sold my 6plus for $250. I never even think about apps now. It just works. My black Nokia 1020 with the recharging case sits in my desk. Worthless.
  • roryisok 9y ago
    > My black Nokia 1020 with the recharging case sits in my desk. Worthless. Can I have it? Since it's worthless and everything. I'll pay shipping.
    • ChicagoDave 9y ago
      Well worthless is subjective. There's some value since the camera is pretty great and it can still be used as a legit phone. And I keep tabs on if anyone has built some 3rd party tools for it to turn it into something cool. You can pester me on LinkedIn if you want: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chidave/ https://www.linkedin.com/in/chidave/
• kanishkdudeja 9y ago
  Isn't there a Surface Phone in the works? I've heard lots of rumours about it.
• jicea 9y ago
  In 2009, when announcing Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft launched the Windows Marketplace, a tentative to catch up with the App Store Gold rush. We were a french Windows Mobile game company back then, so we decided to submit our games to the Windows Marketplace. The process was really not smooth, on the technical side, on the "marketing" side and the process side. On the technical side, the apps submission was crippled with bugs, with cryptic messages that we couldn't figure. A lot of developers were having the same troubles and we painfully figured out what were the problems while searching Microsoft forums. It gave me a really bad impression, and I remembered not being impressed at all. We were also in the process of submitting our first app to the iOS App Store and comparing the two experiences was not good for Microsoft, even with the complexity of certificates/signatures of the App Store. On the marketing side, the entry price for submitting 5 apps to the Marketplace was $99. Then, you had to pay $10 for each new app, or for a new localised version of your app (you had to create a new entry for each localised version). Once again, on the iOS store, you just had to pay $99/year for a developper certificate and then you could submit any number of apps/version you want. I didn't understand back then why Microsoft had chosen theses rules: they just had to copy a successful model from their competitor. We did what almost all developers did at this time : we paid $99, submitted 5 apps and waited to see how successful was the Marketplace. Our game, a puzzle game called Meon, began to be downloaded a lot. We saw purchases going up in the Marketplace vendor interface. We were super happy, but there was a problem. We couldn't figure how to fill the paiement account. All instructions seemed to be written for a US developper : you had to provide a proof of identity signed by a notary, you had to fill a W8-BEN form etc... We kept trying to submit our W8-BEN form but kept receiving email about our W8-BEN that told-us something was bad with it. For 6 months, we couldn't fill our paiement information, while we saw the royalties climbed up. At the same time, Microsoft launched the "Race to Market Challenge" to boost the Marketplace and motivate developer to submit apps. Ironically, we won the race in the 'Most Downloaded Free Application' (and accessory a really really big Microsoft Surface Table). As winner, we were invited in August in Seattle, among other developers, to attend to a private presentation of what will be the next Microsoft platform, Windows Phone 7. It was really cool from Microsoft to invite us, a small game company (3 persons) among big name like Bank of America. In the Microsoft office, I managed to explain our payment problem to one of the presenter, he sent a mail and few days later, our payment information was validated and we finally got our money. What I learned then was to not trust Microsoft when you’re a small developer : if I hadn't been able to contact a Microsoft manager in person, I wouldn't be able to get my money. The whole process was not ready, and not in the same league of the growing App Store. As a 3 developers company, we prioritised to work on iOS and Android. Microsoft sent us Lumia phone to develop apps for Windows 7: It was too late, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
• hugh4life 9y ago
  If I was Microsoft I'd work on something like a browser based mobile OS like Firefox OS. Firefox OS failed but that was before ES6 and asmjs.
• Animats 9y ago
  Does this mean that Groove Music will go the way of Zune and PlaysForSure?
  • pducks32 9y ago
    It already did. They are shutting down the streaming service.
    • Animats 9y ago
      Microsoft is not part of the music ecosystem. ("PlaysForSure is not part of the Zune ecosystem" - Microsoft flack, 2006)
• jumpkickhit 9y ago
  That's too bad. I had an old HP Ipaq running Win CE back years before Apple did their first iPhone. Microsoft was first, and it worked pretty well. Another case of MS getting into things too soon, and somehow missing the boat again as time moves by.
• insulanian 9y ago
  It was just a matter of time.
• thisoneforwork 9y ago
  Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, I have worked for Microsoft before and quit, and come back. I love the company, but I am no zealot (tried to standardize a company on Macs during my six years away, because it made sense). I never worked on Windows Phone, but I know the company and the tech well. Here is where we fucked up: 1. We were, for a long time, a company, where every product/business group had to pay for its own right to exist. Everyone had their own P&L, contribution margin targets, marketing. You had to make money by yourself to stay alive. KT made sure we all understood this. 2. We had a history of "fast follower" successes - Windows, Word, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, IE, even Intune nowadays, and many many others got successful not by disrupting the current market leader or by hardcore innovation, but by leveraging either an open or standard platform and always getting better, without trying to rewrite the rules of the game. OK, maybe Office rewrote them when it came out, but it was packaging. 3. Balmer (whom I love as a leader) got trolled by Apple's and Google's success, and Microsoft graduating from not really cool to quite uncool. So he decided to tackle them the way it had worked before (point 2.). Simultaneously, he tried to correct point 1, but, as radical as his 2014 reorganization to break org barriers was, he did not get rid of KT (Kevin Turner). KT brought in the money, KT defined the culture. Everyone had to keep making their own money. We could have: Offered the mobile OS for free from day one. Given Office on Mobile for free from day one. Bought or OEMed Xamarin a lot sooner. Returned 100% of app revenue to app devs who sell through the Windows Store. Made dev tools (Studio CE) free earlier. Guaranteed no data collection (remember the Scroogled campaign…?) All those have either been done, or are irrelevant now, while the stock is still at a record high, after we lost the game... We could have done all of the above and fare better than we have, and we have fared well. Instead, we comp hardware sellers on MARGIN, as if it makes a bloody difference. We monetize the post install experience. All bullshit for pennies. Everyone had to make money on their own so we missed the bigger picture. Satya fixed this, and it hurt, as it was the only way left to go. I gave up on a phone I really liked, as I saw no future. I don't know if I should hope for us bringing new phones out, but I sure hope we never again let our Operating Mechanisms kill our ability to see the big picture and disrupt the market.
  • julian_1 9y ago
    > We could have: Offered the mobile OS for free from day one. Given Office on Mobile for free from day one. Bought or OEMed Xamarin a lot sooner. [...] Made dev tools (Studio CE) free earlier. Quoted for emphasis. It's remarkable in hindsight that Microsoft didn't try to leverage it's own already successful products with their inherent network effects, to buy market-share.
• Philosopher 9y ago
  If you supported Edge or IE for Windows 10 Desktop then it would of supported the mobile version since both use the same platform. So you are still going to have to support this OS if you are targeting Windows for desktop and tablets.
• Shorel 9y ago
  I still don't understand why they killed MSN Messenger. Everyone I knew, we used messenger to communicate. Now we use WhatsApp or something else. It was the door to do all they can't do now.
• Cyberspy 9y ago
  This is karma for the way they started their 'Windows Smartphone' project, aka 'Stinger' (their internal name). They partnered with UK-based Sendo, who should have been their go-to-market partner, until Microsoft nicked all the code and gave it to HTC. They, in turn, partnered with Orange to bring out the SPV. How do we know it was Sendo's code? becuase it had Sendo's bugs - the eact version could be determined by which bugs it had and didn't have. When Microsoft starts out like this, they deserve every little failurethey get! Refs: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterplan_to_screw_phone/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterpla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_SPV https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_SPV
• skc 9y ago
  So that's Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft that failed with phones. I think it's safe to say we will never see a viable third option in mobile. Might as well start thinking of the next great paradigm shift but even there it's hard to see anyone out maneuvering Apple and Google.
  • Antrikshy 9y ago
    Both Amazon's and Facebook's attempts were modifications atop Android. You could throw Samsung's skinned Android into the same comparison and call it a success.
  • c3534l 9y ago
    Those are like the poster children of tech industry network effects. Apple was first, Google decoupled the OS from the hardware, and Windows came in two years after Google without the goodwill Google has. Amazon and Facebook are the same story. Too late, not hip enough to catch on with the cool kids.
• enos_feedler 9y ago
  I think a big question now is will Microsoft build a smartphone product on top of Android? This will help them capture existing app ecosystem and enable them to provide "the best of Microsoft" for enterprise mobile customers. The cloud market is so important and it just seems strategically weak to not have a phone platform to connect with that. Google Cloud has Google Play Services and there is lots of opportunity there.
  • askvictor 9y ago
    What Google has done with iOS and even Android (particularly with Samsung's play to break dependency on Google) might be where MS is heading. Google has decoupled their apps/services from the OS, and provided a consistent 'Google-y' UX (or working towards that anyway) across all of the platforms. MS seems to be in the way there, with Edge being released for both mobile platforms.
• miketery 9y ago
  What if Microsoft open sourced it? Maybe with the understanding that the default search engine would be Bing and browser edge?
• hehno 9y ago
  I honestly thought they did pretty bad trying to enter the market. It was already flooded.
• watmough 9y ago
  The weird thing is that Win Phone 8 (ish) was pretty nice with great animations, and nice fit and finish, then they seemed to throw all that away in later versions.
• shmerl 9y ago
  Not something I'll regret about. I'm looking forward to Librem 5 running Plasma Mobile with native Wayland and baseband separated from the CPU (they've just succeeded in crowdfunding).
• MentallyRetired 9y ago
  I actually really like windows 10 mobile, but as a developer my attention span is limited and the market just wasn't there. That said, I think if they announced convergence on all devices, released some really nice hardware (surface phone anybody?), and marketed convergence as the Next Big Thing, they could have made some serious in-roads in market share. "Your all-in-one wonder device is ready!"
• jarym 9y ago
  Windows Phone had potential. All MS needed to do was to show some real commitment to it by keeping APIs relatively stable and not impose any onerous requirements. APIs were never stable for very long and all the weird UI decisions they tried to force down peoples throats really backfired. The marketing hype around universal apps backfired too - the developer APIs were not at all aligned with the marketing vision. Truthfully, I think Microsoft is adjusting to being a corporation without a monopoly. That's what it comes down to - away from the desktop users had more attractive options (iOS/Android) and even on the desktop users just avoided upgrading (I skipped both Vista and Windows 8) while others have totally ditched desktops altogether. Bye bye WiMo.
• richestpeople 9y ago
  https://www.richestpeopleonearth.com/ https://www.richestpeopleonearth.com/
• richestpeople 9y ago
  LOOK AT THIS. https://www.richestpeopleonearth.com/ https://www.richestpeopleonearth.com/
• jarjoura 9y ago
  Look I don't want to beat a dead horse, but Microsoft has no one else to blame but themselves. The launch version was a great early adopter MVP and moved the entire mobile industry to a content first paradigm (flat UI). However, they never tried to catch up in the feature department. Instead they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory. So during all of those years, developers were left with those same C# MVP APIs that didn't support all the various things 3rd party companies needed. It required hiring a specialist C# engineer and spending extra time to fill in the gaps left behind. No company was going to do that with a phone barely at 10% of the market. Microsoft should have ruthlessly focused on getting feature parity with iPhone and Android, and released updates every month. Showed the world they were serious about being a 1st-tier dominant player. Instead, they felt lazy and slow. I think there was 18 months between one release to the next without a peep from them. That's no way to instill confidence that they were competent at their job.
  • acdha 9y ago
    > they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory. I think it’s easy for us to focus on software but I don’t think any of that mattered compared to failing so badly on the hardware side. Over that period, how many weeks were there where they had phone hardware which was competitive with Android, much less iOS? It seemed like every time I saw it mentioned the cycle was “<software feature> looks cool but the phone specs are like my old phone”.
    • naikrovek 9y ago
      That was one of the little gems of Windows Phone. It could do what your current generation Android/Apple phone could do on previous generation hardware. WP hardware was dirt cheap because of it.
• seltzered_ 9y ago
  Previous discussion on windows phone's death - "Who Killed Windows Phone?" : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835372 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835372 Notably @saurik's comment on google's relationship on windows phone: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835776 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14835776 It's interesting considering the competing platform influence as today we're seeing headlines of the amazon echo show getting discounted after the youtube support got pulled: https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/9/16448280/amazon-echo-show-price-cut-discount-deal-30-youtube-removal https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/9/16448280/a... My first memory of windows phone was running wp7 on an htc hd2. At the time it was curiously interesting since I was writing code with WPF. In the beginning were definately some interesting aspects on paper - the legitimized 'jailbreak' mode, decent multi-tasking for it's time, writing apps with visual studio/c# (which felt much better than xcode at the time, and had a community defining many of the initial reactive/mvvm work used in many places today). But watching friends purchase Lumias that didn't get updates for wp8 months later showed just how much has to be done on a support front, especially for a new platform.
• ezioamf 9y ago
  MS need to create a windows phone that runs Android + Windows apps + can be turned on a full Windows Desktop running on ARM when docked up.
• Pxtl 9y ago
  It's a shame, I had a win7 device and it had some great ideas, they had the groundwork laid for a solid platform... But from what I've heard, it didn't get better as it progressed.
• bad_user 9y ago
  I used a Nokia Lumia with Windows Phone 8. People say that the UI was better than Android or iOS, but I disagree. The flat UI of Windows Phone was completely unintuitive. In the real world it's many times easy to distinguish objects you can interact with, by shape, texture or touch. With feature phones or remote controls you had hardware buttons. With PC monitors and touch screens all controls are virtual, you get no 3D or touch feedback, so you have to rely on visual clues and visual patterns. The flat UI of Windows Phone was pretty bad, providing no visual clues whatsoever, so you where left to touch text randomly on the screen, in the hope that some of it will click. I see people here giving examples of technically illiterate wives and grandparents successfully using the Windows Phone, but guys, you're kind of missing the forest from the trees. It's not that hard to learn how to make a phone call, or write an SMS, given that it's an operation that you're doing every couple of hours. You simply have to learn the path from home screen to whatever you want to do. Ask any child and he'll tell you that this is best done by trial and error and it is never a problem for repetitive operations, because we've got good memories. The problems happens when you interact with an application UI that you've never seen before. And to be honest, even though I've been primarily an iOS user for the past 3 years, the best of the bunch in this regard is Android. By comparison Android's material design provides intelligent clues about what can be pressed, or about what interaction just happened. And the design of Android applications is pretty flat, in the sense that available options are clearly laid out in front of you, no need to guess or to trigger hidden menus. My favorite example was RunKeeper for iOS versus Android. The Android version had clear action buttons for starting a race, allowing me to easily select the type, whereas the iOS interface had the options hidden behind a menu that would appear when I tapped on the logo, which was a pretty dumb idea. I'm not even going to mention the dedicated Back button of Android, because people that don't have an Android just don't get it. But back to Windows Phone, I don't know what you folks have been smoking, but it had terrible UI. And the apps where horrible. Its only saving grace where those Nokia Lumia phones that had a good quality/price ratio, but Android was already dominating the cheap smartphone market and a cheap Android might have been worse, but at least it had apps.
• dzonga 9y ago
  if I was Microsoft's CEO, I would have donated $ billions to Mozilla. Then let Mozilla to build the best mobile browser. The Web can easily abstract the OS. As WeChat has shown. That way I can sell more handsets and also bespoke "Microsoft Services" based on the web.
• royge 9y ago
  It was already too late that MS embrace opensource and made their IDE(Visual Studio) for free. Developers who can't afford it already moved on and used free and opensource alternatives and then start to love it without looking back at MS stuff. They then realize that MS technologies are not the only cool tools and programming languages to write applications with and make money.
• tomelders 9y ago
  MS really doesn't understand why people don't like their products. And that's a bit bonkers. People get paid lots of money to think about that problem everyday, and they still can't figure it out. Nobody trusts you. They don't trust your vision. They don't trust your commitment. They don't trust your ability. They don't trust your execution. And they don't trust your intentions. no one trusts Microsoft. Well maybe some people do, but how's that working out for you?
• denisehilton 9y ago
  This is really sad. They shouldn't have given up so early. They could have improved a lot. People still trust Microsoft even with mobile phones.
• wintorez 9y ago
  Microsoft is a joke, and not even a good one.
• BigIQ 9y ago
  I wonder what that guy has done to get and keep such an elite tech job, complete with year-long vacations, and doesn't even have to 'pretend' to use his own products.
• convefefe 9y ago
  If you supported Edge or IE for Windows 10 Desktop then it would of supported the mobile version since both use the same platform. So you are still going to have to support this OS if you are targeting Windows for desktop and tablets.
• davidson_1974 9y ago
  This reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (Ballmer Laughs at iPhone)