6 ms·

No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much ow

No one involved in the transition from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone should be satisfied, it was a complete failure. At the time Windows Mobile pretty much owned the Smart Phone market(unless you consider BB at the time smart phones, they were close to but not just IMO. No where near the freedom as WM). But over Windows Mobiles life time it completely stagnated, but even with that had a large following. With there transition to Windows Phone they completely deserted there current user base opting for a more iphonesk ecosystem. That of restriction instead of freedom. Ironically Android is the true successor to Windows Mobile, and in a position Microsoft can only dream of right now.

pedalpete 14y ago
Though I agree with much of your comment, I think you're missing the timing a bit. I don't think it is the transition team specifically that is the issue, but rather the leadership did not recognize where the market was going, or didn't think the market was big enough to dedicate the right resources. Big mistake. They shouldn't have been responding to Apple and Android, they should have been leading it all. This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action. I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.
martinced 14y ago
I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you. The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries. We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody. There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others. There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones. It has always been an utter failure. Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )
- jug6ernaut 14y ago
  I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :). But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share. [1]
  - seanmcdirmid 14y ago
    But WM's marketshare of the overall mobile phone market was never that large, so ya, they lost half, but half of a small share. I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.
- macspoofing 14y ago
  >There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.
  - edderly 14y ago
    This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million. Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....
    - macspoofing 14y ago
DenisM 14y ago
You're mixing the time frames. When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.
- dman 14y ago
  Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain - a) Windows phone 6.5 b) Windows phone 7.x c) Windows phone 8.x d) Project Pink / Kin e) Danger f) Windows 8 RT g) Courier
  - mynameisvlad 14y ago
    To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And finally, we don't know where the Courier team fit into the whole plan, since it was an incubation project. Therefore, we get: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM - Danger/Pink And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team. Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - RyJones 14y ago
      PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier. WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example). The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.
hugi 14y ago
wut? I don't recall Windows mobile ever being usable, or "owning the smart phone market". Where are you located in the world?
kabdib 14y ago
The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen. MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share. I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions. The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible. Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.
- pablasso 14y ago
  That's really insightful. The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?
  - kabdib 14y ago
    The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.

pedalpete 14y ago

Though I agree with much of your comment, I think you're missing the timing a bit. I don't think it is the transition team specifically that is the issue, but rather the leadership did not recognize where the market was going, or didn't think the market was big enough to dedicate the right resources. Big mistake. They shouldn't have been responding to Apple and Android, they should have been leading it all. This is probably a good example of the innovators dilemma in action. I also disagree that Android is the 'true successor to Windows Mobile'. Sure it is somewhat more open than WP, but I don't think openness is what is a key part of Android's success.

martinced 14y ago

I was working in the mobile business before the iPhone came and owned everybody (waiting then for Android) and I recall things totally differently than you. The smartphone market was owned by Nokia and their Sxx series. That and the BlackBerries. We were working on mostly Nokia (either native or Java), Qualcomm BREW (C++) and, granted, we had some demand for Windows Mobile but they were pretty much a nobody in that pre-iPhone world. Just as they're still nobody. There was hardly any customer demand for Windows Mobile compared to Nokia and the others. There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones. It has always been an utter failure. Now of course you may your definition of a "pre-iPhone Smartphone" which appears to be: "Certainly not a BlackBerry and certainly not anything that wasn't running Windows Mobile". So then it becomes hard to argue ; )

jug6ernaut 14y ago
I cant really argue with to much of what you say, but in my defense as i said in my original post i dont really consider BB to be smartphones, i would also extend this to Symbian. Though this is entirely my opinion, most of which i would probably say is as much my bias to WM as anything :). But at the same time if you look at the statistics here on market percentage [1], you see my main point to that windows has lost nearly all of its previous market share. [1]
- seanmcdirmid 14y ago
  But WM's marketshare of the overall mobile phone market was never that large, so ya, they lost half, but half of a small share. I don't see anything else Microsoft could have done with Windows Phone (disclosure: I'm a Microsoft employee but no inside info). I mean, the iPhone was pure disruption. Android then comes a long and destroys the market for OSes because they gave it away! So iPhone disrupts the high end, Android disrupts the low end, and Microsoft is put into an interesting non-trivial position.
macspoofing 14y ago
>There has been no "transition" because MS never was anywhere that mattered with their phones ... That's not really true because there was the PDA market, which was dominated by Palm and Microsoft. So you had RIM and Nokia in one corner, and Palm and Microsoft in the other. Any one of them could have created the iPhone but none of them really got it, and they are where they are.
- edderly 14y ago
  This is fairly illusory as a comparison. I don't believe the PDA market ever amounted to more than 12 million devices a year. Whilst by the year 2000 the entire mobile phone market was around 700 million. Plus it didn't help that MS were trying to charge unrealistic prices for the OS, in 1999 they were asking for $80 per unit....
  - macspoofing 14y ago

DenisM 14y ago

You're mixing the time frames. When Widows Mobile Smartphone came out in 2003, it was the most advanced, most open, most app-friendly phone OS. However, there were not substantial improvements for the next 5 years - the product was in fact stillborn. The Windows Phone team was then brought in to bury the corpse, and start afresh, which is what they did. It wasn't their fault that the predecessor has died several years earlier.

dman 14y ago
Microsoft invented their own troubles in this market. How many parallel mobility teams can one company reasonably sustain - a) Windows phone 6.5 b) Windows phone 7.x c) Windows phone 8.x d) Project Pink / Kin e) Danger f) Windows 8 RT g) Courier
- mynameisvlad 14y ago
  To be fair, those teams were not parallel. 6.5 died with 7, which died with 8. Danger was a subsidiary, and they made Project Pink, so they're the same. Windows on ARM, yes, was a team, but not associated with Mobility. They're a Windows 8 team, not a Windows Phone team, so they're not actually competing with WP nor are they working on mobility-specific platforms. They simply deal with Windows on ARM processors. And finally, we don't know where the Courier team fit into the whole plan, since it was an incubation project. Therefore, we get: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM - Danger/Pink And then some Courier Team, probably a MS Research team (so not part of an actual commercial team) which I wouldn't count as a team. Then, Danger was folded into Windows Phone, and Courier was killed off, leaving: - Windows Phone - Windows on ARM
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
  - RyJones 14y ago
    PMX wasn't Danger, and PMX did Pink/Kin. Danger was folded into PMX, true, but the history is way messier than you're letting on. Some of the survivors of the PMX fiasco / power grab went on to Courier. WoA did absorb some parts of WiMo (power management, for example). The whole thing makes me want to cry in frustration. The day the iPhone was announced, the halls of 116-117-118-119 were filled with shell shocked, demoralized, pissed off people.

hugi 14y ago

wut? I don't recall Windows mobile ever being usable, or "owning the smart phone market". Where are you located in the world?

kabdib 14y ago

The code base for WinMobile was a horrible, disgusting mess. The build system is one of the worst I've ever seen. MS let WinMobile rot internally for years, building up tons of technical debt, and they paid for it in market share. I was on a project that was repurposing pieces of the WM6 code, just cherry-picking drivers and stuff. We used to go rummaging through the source code on "Wait, you thought /that/ was bad..." sessions. The BSPs ("Board Support Packages") that provided drivers and and other low-level code for the various platforms that WM ran on were written by third parties, largely by contractors, largely by the /same/ contractors, and the code quality was again terrible. Don't ever let code quality and good system design take a back seat to politics, personal agendas or convenience. That kind of nonsense is at the core of why MS is not a major power in the mobile market today. Senior management at MS utterly dropped the ball; I like to think it's because the upper echelons don't really read code or look at designs any more.

pablasso 14y ago
That's really insightful. The code ended up being that awful to maintain because of deadlines pressures or Microsoft inherited the code base from a buyout of another company?
- kabdib 14y ago
  The code was awful because there was no accountability. No oversight. Nothing happened to you if you checked in junk, as long as it compiled. Q/A was happy if their tests ran and every function did mindless NULL checking on parameters.