4 ms·

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. Th

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
    Pre-iPhone, there was a small PDA market, a bigger smartphone market, and a huge cell phone market. PDAs are a precursor to the iPhone, as much as (if not more than) Blackberries and Symbian phones. Both Palm and Microsoft were experimenting with PDAs with phone functionality years before the iPhone (which is why Ballmer was so dismissive of the iPhone at launch). They were so very close.
    - edderly 14y ago
      Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features. However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high. The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments. IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0 Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.

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
  Pre-iPhone, there was a small PDA market, a bigger smartphone market, and a huge cell phone market. PDAs are a precursor to the iPhone, as much as (if not more than) Blackberries and Symbian phones. Both Palm and Microsoft were experimenting with PDAs with phone functionality years before the iPhone (which is why Ballmer was so dismissive of the iPhone at launch). They were so very close.
  - edderly 14y ago
    Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features. However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high. The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments. IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0 Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.