4 ms·

Agreed. The parent post reads like "the overwhelming numbers of our competitors beat poor Microsoft despite our talent, ability and courage!" No, Microsoft bea

Agreed. The parent post reads like "the overwhelming numbers of our competitors beat poor Microsoft despite our talent, ability and courage!" No, Microsoft beat Microsoft. It was their game to lose.

burnte 9y ago
It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone, and the guys at Android said, "Oh shit." Meanwhile Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never succeed. Ballmer drove MS into the ground. Everyone pivoted to the iPhone model except MS, who spit out WinMo 6.5 in 2009, and finally WinMo 7 in 2010. By 2010, the race was pretty much over. The rest of what MS did was half-assed at best. You're 100% right, MS beat MS.
- digi_owl 9y ago
  And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5. Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform. Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.
  - smitherfield 9y ago
    > Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone. Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).
    - v-yadli 9y ago
      http://mobilehtml5.org/ http://mobilehtml5.org/ I'm interested in how you would define full-featured. Please check the symbian & opera columns. Also, iOS 1.0 ships with Safari3.0, not Safari3.1.1 in this test. In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :) Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
      - smitherfield 9y ago
        I mean full-featured in the sense of end user experience. If you have any example prior to 2007 of a mobile browser rendering the full New York Times website perfectly,[1] I'm all ears. But as I remember the below link was, for good reason, the biggest "wow" moment of any demo Steve Jobs ever gave. [1] https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s
        v-yadli 9y ago
        I partially agree with you, in that the rendering of the page is good-looking in circa 2007 standard on a mobile device. But rendering one page nicely does not prove it is full-featured. It has to go through some kind of benchmark, which reflects the general ability to process trillions of other pages out there. It loses to Opera Mobile or Symbian browser on the test I just googled (not sure about how accurate it is though). A full-fledged browser experience in 2007 to me means at least I could have mouse hover, to deal with sites not yet adapting to mobile computing (there were a lot of them). WM6 browsers did that. If it fails, I'd go and use my Palm device to VNC into my workstation -- a 2004 Sony device that will be up-to-date forever because it is a decent thin client. I also remember opera mini being a very handy browser on lower end phones like the S40 models. Since the first iOS safari does not do javascript IIRC, it makes no difference if the rendering is done with WebKit locally, or pre-computed on a server. The only difference is that iPhone has a bigger viewport, which allows you to consider the webpage a minified version of the desktop rendering -- and you are able to freely swipe, zoom, rotate -- not relating to the functionality of the browser itself. I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think, if iPhone1 runs Opera Mobile (with beefy 128MB RAM and fancy graphics chip), it beats the built-in Safari to the ground. Of course it will cause other troubles -- battery life, thermal management, slow startup, or even unstability etc. This is, to my understanding, why Apple decided to ship a "reduced" version of Safari3. Edit: adding explainations.
  - chungy 9y ago
    I assume the iphone was "more fancy featurephone" due to the lack of 3rd party apps? I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on. It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.
    - xorcist 9y ago
      Don't confuse the lack of modern mobile apps with any mobile apps. There was a thriving ecosystem around mobile apps at the time. Not only Windows Mobile and Blackberry but Symbian too, which I believe was the largest, and Treo. There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it. That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.
    - pedasmith 9y ago
      I worked for a company in 2006 that was considering writing phone apps (we already had a bunch of Windows apps). At the time, each phone company wanted to "curate" the apps for their own phone stores. At least one company wanted, for each $10 app, about $11 of revenue. The result: we decided that it would be essentially impossible to ever make money from phone apps. What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people. [disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]

Agreed. The parent post reads like "the overwhelming numbers of our competitors beat poor Microsoft despite our talent, ability and courage!" No, Microsoft beat Microsoft. It was their game to lose.

burnte 9y ago

It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone, and the guys at Android said, "Oh shit." Meanwhile Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never succeed. Ballmer drove MS into the ground. Everyone pivoted to the iPhone model except MS, who spit out WinMo 6.5 in 2009, and finally WinMo 7 in 2010. By 2010, the race was pretty much over. The rest of what MS did was half-assed at best. You're 100% right, MS beat MS.

digi_owl 9y ago
And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5. Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform. Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.
- smitherfield 9y ago
  > Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone. Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).
  - v-yadli 9y ago
    http://mobilehtml5.org/ http://mobilehtml5.org/ I'm interested in how you would define full-featured. Please check the symbian & opera columns. Also, iOS 1.0 ships with Safari3.0, not Safari3.1.1 in this test. In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :) Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-about-the-iphone-and-technology-now https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...
    - smitherfield 9y ago
      I mean full-featured in the sense of end user experience. If you have any example prior to 2007 of a mobile browser rendering the full New York Times website perfectly,[1] I'm all ears. But as I remember the below link was, for good reason, the biggest "wow" moment of any demo Steve Jobs ever gave. [1] https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s
      - v-yadli 9y ago
        I partially agree with you, in that the rendering of the page is good-looking in circa 2007 standard on a mobile device. But rendering one page nicely does not prove it is full-featured. It has to go through some kind of benchmark, which reflects the general ability to process trillions of other pages out there. It loses to Opera Mobile or Symbian browser on the test I just googled (not sure about how accurate it is though). A full-fledged browser experience in 2007 to me means at least I could have mouse hover, to deal with sites not yet adapting to mobile computing (there were a lot of them). WM6 browsers did that. If it fails, I'd go and use my Palm device to VNC into my workstation -- a 2004 Sony device that will be up-to-date forever because it is a decent thin client. I also remember opera mini being a very handy browser on lower end phones like the S40 models. Since the first iOS safari does not do javascript IIRC, it makes no difference if the rendering is done with WebKit locally, or pre-computed on a server. The only difference is that iPhone has a bigger viewport, which allows you to consider the webpage a minified version of the desktop rendering -- and you are able to freely swipe, zoom, rotate -- not relating to the functionality of the browser itself. I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think, if iPhone1 runs Opera Mobile (with beefy 128MB RAM and fancy graphics chip), it beats the built-in Safari to the ground. Of course it will cause other troubles -- battery life, thermal management, slow startup, or even unstability etc. This is, to my understanding, why Apple decided to ship a "reduced" version of Safari3. Edit: adding explainations.
- chungy 9y ago
  I assume the iphone was "more fancy featurephone" due to the lack of 3rd party apps? I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on. It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.
  - xorcist 9y ago
    Don't confuse the lack of modern mobile apps with any mobile apps. There was a thriving ecosystem around mobile apps at the time. Not only Windows Mobile and Blackberry but Symbian too, which I believe was the largest, and Treo. There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it. That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.
  - pedasmith 9y ago
    I worked for a company in 2006 that was considering writing phone apps (we already had a bunch of Windows apps). At the time, each phone company wanted to "curate" the apps for their own phone stores. At least one company wanted, for each $10 app, about $11 of revenue. The result: we decided that it would be essentially impossible to ever make money from phone apps. What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people. [disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]