>the Windows Phone campaign was inexcusably mismanaged to such a degree that it seemed deliberate From what I remember in the US, the phone stores just weren't

>the Windows Phone campaign was inexcusably mismanaged to such a degree that it seemed deliberate From what I remember in the US, the phone stores just weren't interested in pushing them too much, for various reasons. That's not MS's fault. Maybe you didn't think they were ugly, but a lot of people did. Aesthetics have never been MS's strong suit, nor has naming (their names are always horribly boring and unimaginative, unless they buy it, e.g. PowerPoint or Excel). MS also had a bad reputation because everyone knew they made the OS on their home and/or work computer that crashed all the time. XP will still in use at that time, remember, and 95/98/Me weren't that far in the past at that point. MS also has a bad history of abandoning their products. You mentioned Zune; right before that, they had "PlaysForSure", which didn't "play for sure" because they abandoned it and all those customers were screwed. On Windows Phone, people who bought the earlier versions were screwed because they were incompatible with the later versions. (IIRC, this was a big problem because the apps were incompatible between the versions, and this made the app store problem even worse.)