Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake

Hypx@kbin.social to Technology@lemmy.world – 600 points – Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
theverge.com

Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.

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There’s nothing stopping Microsoft from coming out with a new phone line, other than poor management.

Replace "new phone line" with pretty much anything 'positive' and it fits Microsoft.

Better OS? Nope! Shit management. Better productivity software? Nope! Shit management. Better cloud and virtualization platform? Nope! Shit management.

The first day I used Windows 8 RC, I was flabbergasted that anyone approved that dumpster fire for release. They've been trying to unfuck that ever since, and at dead snail's pace. Thanks, shit management! You're why I left systems administration to be a bad programmer!

What do you program in? Ive really enjoyed the new .NET ecosystem, but I'm sure it'll go to shit eventually just like the rest of their products...

That's the irony! Mainly working in C# .NET (and some SSIS) and maintaining an unfair amount of legacy VB on ETL processes.

FWIW I was working in Java on the middle-end of Oracle for a few years before changing positions to where I am.

But at least I'm never on-call!

For real. AOSP is open source, and Google is taking more things private. MS could start driving AOSP since FOSS projects go where the group contributing the most wants it to go.

That would force them to adopt different languages internally though. I don't know what they are doing these days, but something tells me it's not kotlin and jetpack.

What about Windows subsystem for Android?

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/android/wsa/

It even gives developer options where you can sideload unsigned apk files for developing your own.

I mean, they've at least made inroads with Android, it's not impossible to consider them making moves in the area.

It sure seems like they still do love their Embrace, Extend, Extinguish strategy.

They’re already talking up .NET MAUI. Their cross-platform C# application UI.

I’m also not sure MS cares that much if that gets them in the game.

That's really not a big barrier. Just add a couple folks with experience in the desired tech and any good dev team will continue to be a good dev team, even if everything changed under them.

Absolutely, they could if they wanted to and they do have Android devs on staff for the Xbox app. I just get the impression there isn't a lot of focus put on those efforts (given the state and featureset of said Android app). But, they could focus on it if they really cared about it. Problem is, it's an unknown to the C level execs so it's probably too risky to spend money on. Gotta keep those shareholder profits up or risk their positions.

I wish this can be true but that's bow how trillion dollar companies work. There's lot of redtape involved. Think of it as one drug dealer is not allowed to deal drugs on other dealers turf. But something tell me if we start praising elon , probably he'll take the bait and might drive aosp away from google but I also fear he might burn the whole thing down to the ground lol

It's not that easy on the hardware side. Keep in mind that the way both Google and Microsoft previously entered this market was by buying an established manufacturer (Motorola and Nokia, respectively). But Microsoft squandered Nokia's manufacturing assets and would need to either start from scratch or acquire somebody else. But there aren't many manufacturers left that are decent, non-Chinese, and willing to sell.

There's also the option to pair with a manufacturer and ask them to put Microsoft's OS on their phones, but Google would most likely lean on anybody attempting that and threaten to revoke their access to Android trademark and Google Services. Samsung is the only manufacturer in a position to tell them to suck it but they're locked into a complex struggle with Google and it's anybody's guess if taking Microsoft on board would help or hinder their position.

The appeal of the "we could have been a contender" fantasy for Microsoft is the idea that they'd be printing money by collecting the 30% tax on apps and in-app purchases. If they were 100% dependent on Samsung, they'd be printing at least 50% less money

Microsoft does make phones - the Surface Duo line. Unfortunately it's really not comparable to other phones in the same price range.

Windows Phone failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.

They literally couldn’t pay the devs. Netflix for instance flat out refused to have blackberry pay for 2 full time devs to maintain an app.

Netflix looked at the market share and determined that there was 0 benefit. The people that were on blackberry devices already had a Netflix account.

Additionally Blackberry store apps were compelling for devs. Dev feedback included ease of development and more importantly they made a lot more money on the blackberry store than on iOS/android, both because the cut was better and they could jack the prices up because the customers were not nearly as frugal.

To get into mobile would require a massive overhaul of windows apps to get them mobile-friendly

Oh look, that’s exactly what they did and now we have PWAs for lots of apps. Maybe MS is getting ready to take a stab at mobile again.

Netflix have a different relationship with Microsoft than they did with Blackberry, MS would have had much more clout.

Actually, the main cause it failed was because Microsoft bullied the manufacturers until they said enough and bailed out. So they were forced to buy a manufacturer to keep going (Nokia) then gave up halfway through after buying it.

Microsoft has stupid amounts of cash and could have kept Windows Phone going indefinitely, even at a loss. It's how they broke into the console market, by keeping the Xbox going at a loss for a decade.

Yeah the lack of apps would have been a problem initially but everybody would have relented given enough time, and in the meantime most of the missing services could have been accessed in a browser.

They couldn’t even be bothered developing their own apps for it. The mail app began to lag behind Outlook on Android, Minecraft was never ported to it when it could have been a killer exclusive app.

Google was often guilty of that too. I remember a number of Android apps that were pretty far behind the iOS ones. I don't think that is the case anymore though.

There were also a bunch of iOS apps behind Android ones. Remember when iOS finally got widgets? Different companies focused on different functionality first. But at this point, android and iOS have had the time to play catch-up with each other.

Difference being that Apple does not make Android apps. Google's own apps on iOS were behind their own on Android. I recall the YouTube and Maps app missing some features for quite a while on Android that were on IOS. I get that companies silo teams from each other but it's a little embarrassing when you're software on your platform is behind your software on your competitor's platform.

OS-wise, yeah it has largely been Apple playing catch up with iOS aside from messaging.

That reminded me when the Remote Desktop app turned up on Android before the Windows Phone. Ludicrous.

This was the downfall of BlackBerry as well.

QNX-based BB10 OS was phenomenal, and their hardware was top notch.

It was the lacking app ecosystem that killed it.

You need to read up on the fall of Blackberry. It was extremely badly mismanaged. It wasn't the lack of apps that killed them.

I was a BB developer right around the time of their demise. It never mattered how good or bad their OS was, because the development environment for BB was complete shit - which was a big part of why nobody wrote apps for it.

They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones.

Blackberry at their end (circa 2011 or so) started handing out $10,000 grants to developers to make apps for them. I thought about applying for one, but $10K is not much at all to develop a decently-featured app that does anything, and BB's development environment was such an unbelievable clusterfuck that really no amount of money could have made worthwhile to endure.

Also: 16-bit color lol.

16-bit color

What the fuck?

5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green. Who needs more than that?

The only reason I liked it at all was that I created a lot of owner-drawn controls (since the built-in Blackberry "fields" were shit) that used a lot of bitmap memory for animation, and reducing your memory footprint by a factor of two (compared to 32-bit graphics) wasn't worthless, especially for the older devices.

Snapchat was the big one missing that really put the nail in the coffin towards the end there.

That is because every single mobile version of Windows was incompatible (After version 6) with the previous. They kept reinventing the wheel over and over again.

They totally did that

The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.

The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.

Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.

Yep, if you don't even have the stuff the first iPhone came with, your platform isn't going to make it.

The first iPhone didn’t come with those things. There wasn’t even an App Store until a year and a half after it came out. The first gen was pretty much crap. It didn’t have 3g when other phones of the time did. It had the best browser but it was slow as shit. The whole page would turn gray when you scrolled around. There was no copy/paste. You couldn’t sync with Exchange. It was missing basic features that other phones of the time had. It was probably the 3GS or the 4 when it got really good.

It did have YouTube and maps.

WP had a far superior 3rd party YouTube app than any other platform's first party app at the time. The only reason why they didn't have a first party was because Google was intentionally throwing road blocks to prevent it from happening.

They also had Nokia's maps which at the time were somehow faaar superior to Google's, even though Google Maps was the most popular platform.

The first iPhone didn't have anything. In terms of features it was laughable and it could barely be considered a smartphone. It succeeded because it was a phone on a touch screen that worked better than any previous attempt at touch screens.

Everything that made iPhone relevant against Android only came out later. Apple had a large quick start on hardware and UX, Android had a large quick start on the feature set. They both worked to close the gap and now we have two very similar products.

Microsoft didn't have that gap with Android on the OS level in any way. It could do everything. But they didn't have apps, because the devs didn't want a third OS to exist. Devs who just wanted to expand their customer base were making apps for wp just fine. Companies who wanted to manipulate the market into what was more convenient for them did not. Regular folks were making apps to get YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and that sort of stuff working on wp just fine - someone even made a Pokémon Go client that actually worked on windows phone, but the companies behind those platforms actively wanted those apps to not exist in any way.

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Serves them right for what they did to Nokia.

Maemo and Meego were so good

Yes, they were. These bastards destroyed the biggest European tech company for nothing. And Nokia had all the services required and the technical know-how to rival Google.

All credit to Microsoft, but as an ex Nokian my feeling is that Nokia killed itself unwittingly when it bought NavTeq. Because of that sunk cost, they were unwilling to adopt Android as it would invalidate the acquisition, with the leaders responsible still at the reins. Life with Android would be far from the heyday of the past, but living is living.

I was using the N900 when it came out and at that point Android was in no way superior to whatever Nokia was doing. Their main misstep was choosing Windows Phone and shipping the N9 as a dead-on-arrival product. Nonetheless the UX was pretty ahead of its time and we could have had a real Qt based Linux phone OS

I love my N900 and N9 but by the time they were released Android already had unstoppable momentum. It's all about software developers' uptake of the platform. Maemo didn't have it, WP had barely more, but neither was enough to compete. I think Nokia could have been the peer of Samsung as an Android OEM. Their logistics was arguably better even though they didn't have the vertical integration of Samsung.

Edit: if they'd not had the risk-averse management a few years earlier the N770 could have developed into a competitive smartphone platform... But managers were fixated on candybar phones and endless variations on feature phones instead of reaching for their future.

Too be fair, it was a big bet and at that point it was Nokia's only chance of remaining at the top. It they had used android at that point in time, they would have started from the bottom in the race for the android domination that was already seeing some large companies fail. Going with Android that late would at best turn them into another Sony Ericsson unless they executed everything perfectly (which wouldn't happen with the large amount of in-fighting the company had). Going with Windows Phone would be all or nothing. Only time showed it ended up being nothing.

I'm not a Microsoft fan, in fact I think of windows the same way I would an abusive Ex, but there NEEDS To be more competition in the mobile space

yeah, more competition - not another gigantic conglomerate that wants to integrate my phone into my operating system.

more competition would be great, another google/apple type - meh.

Unfortunately only a 'gigantic conglomerate' stands a chance against Google and Apple. The other smartphone OSs - Ubuntu, Manjaro etc. - have a tiny market share.

Just look at how Firefox OS struggled even in developing countries, where it could run much better than Android in low-end smartphones. Then Reliance (a big and very cut-throat company) licenced it and now it has a decent marketshare in India. There are plenty of good alternative OSs, but without a big war chest they aren't getting mainstream acceptance.

Fair enough, what I really want is the ability to have a proper, functional, linux distro on my phone

I'm hoping the slow creep of right to repair laws will help with this. Forcing manufacturers to provide spare parts, documentation and diagnostic tools to independent shops I think will inevitably lead to more open devices in general.

There would already be a vibrant community of smartphone Linux distros right now if bootloaders were unlocked and manufacturers were more forthcoming with documentation.

very good point. the best use for that ewaste would be decent retreads for people who just need a phone and don't care that it's a few years from 'latest and greatest'.

one day... they're certainly powerful enough these days.

I think there is more room with another Android based OS akin to FireOS, a fully Microsoft version of Android, with their desig language over top of what wouldn't need porting outside of Google based dependencies.

By the time he was CEO it was already dead. He was right to kill it.

I have my doubts that a three-horse phone race would have been stable in the first place, as one of those three (Android, iPhone was too established) would have likely fallen out of favor. And then, you all would be complaining about monopolistic practices Microsoft would inevitably be doing.

Google is not a good company, but they have treated Android much better than they could be.

Had Microsoft succeeded, things could have ended up the same as the pc market, with windows being used by big brands and Android being used by companies like 2011 Xiami, making highly customized experiences and that sort.

They say Microsoft lost Samsung to Android by being one month too late. Had they finished that first windows phone one month earlier, everything would probably be different today.

Windows phone was the best phone OS I ever experienced. Features were years ahead of iOS and Android.

I remember it being good hardware and the OS was actually really good. It felt very fast when a lot of Android phones still felt sluggish. What they really screwed up was the third party apps. Nobody was making anything for it and they didn’t give developers a reason to. It was a product that should have succeeded if not for bad management.

This is really the same thing that happened with Blackberry. I'm a mobile developer and I was doing entirely Windows Mobile (which wasn't Windows Phone) from 2005 to 2010, and then I got a Blackberry project dumped in my lap. I was astonished to find that 1) Blackberrys were actually very powerful and adaptable devices, and 2) BB's development environment was the shittiest thing ever invented in the history of humanity.

Man you didn’t have to remind me about my Q10. The phone is a hardware masterpiece and the only thing let down was the software going EOL last year. I only wish they release the firmware to public since they were shutting so community can take it from there.

Yeah, the situation reminds me of BlackBerry. I had the 8900 and it was my favorite phone. I remember when they finally did have a little App Store thing and it was terrible. They threw it together in a hurry so I can only imagine how shitty the dev tools were.

Ironically enough, the dev tools were there (and shitty) from the very beginning in the early 2000s, and they were never really improved upon. The biggest problem was that the code libraries were broken up into multiple (and not completely logical) modules and each module you incorporated into your app had to be digitally signed by a remote server every time you wanted to run your in-development app. The signing server was often slow (or completely down) so sometimes it would take 45 minutes to an hour just to test out a one-line code change (the more modules you included in your app, the longer the overall signing process would take, so I frequently ended up writing my own methods to do standard shit that was in the libraries, just to avoid the compile time hit). Sometimes I would just give up and go home because testing was literally impossible.

On the other hand, it was a great built-in excuse for fucking off. If my managers ever caught me napping, I would just say the signing server was down. I was careful never to tell them about isthesigningserverdown.com, which back in the day told you whether the BB signing servers were actually down or not.

Yup. Even the docs on how to use the store from a dev perspective were always out of date or missing completely.

My brother had one and loved it! But outside of basic tasks he couldn't do anything with it. Eventually he switched to Android just to have apps.

I tried it, but then realized I couldn't even view my photos I took with my Nexus phone at the time. No Google photos app, and the web browser just took me to a page that said my phone isn't supported.

YouTube was also only supported via a third party app, and was missing pretty much every feature.

As soon as I realized I would struggle to do the most basic tasks, I bailed.

name a few. please.

I'm open to being wrong but you need to provide evidence to sway me, because I've used windows phones and developed for them when they were desperate to get games in their app store and it was wretched early on. like comically bad. so whatever firmed up over the years, please, enlighten me, I'm genuinely curious where they were years ahead.

Fuck man I loved windows phone like the guy you're commenting too, and I agree with him. I could have commented and told you all the features I liked that were ahead of its time, about 8 years ago, but ... It's been so long I can't remember shit anymore! Hahaha

Edit: the Camara was fucking awesome. Physical Camara button was pretty dope too, never caught on with other phones so who knows if I'm alone in saying that

Google Nexus (and now Pixel) has always allowed you to double tap the power button to open the camera, and then use the volume buttons to take the photo. Or you can use the volume buttons to zoom in and out.

Isn't this the same? Dedicated buttons that launch the camera and take photos?

Similar but slightly inferior UX. No double-tapping, just a full press (I think) then you can half-press the camera key just like a normal camera to focus, then fully-press to capture. Small, but something I miss, like how if I switch to Android (save for some models) I’ll miss the Palm/iPhone ringer switch - but holding volume down is also something Android-y I miss.

Samsung Galaxy phones are the same way, honestly I think you can even set up an iPhone to do that. It's not the same ... The lower was on the bottom right side of the phone, and was in a perfect position to hold your phone like a camera and snap a picture.

It missed custom apps but all the default phone apps were really great. The "people" app already had everything the android's "contacts" app implemented in subsequent years (everything it has today) and also integrated with social networks so if you accessed a contact you could see all their posts from every social media in a custom timeline.

The "me" app also integrated all your social media notifications into one app, allowing you to post to all of them from the same place, see replies and that sort of stuff.

I don't remember what it was, but the "mail" app had a feature that was my favorite thing in the whole WP7, but by the time WP8 came out Google had already managed to make it not wok with Gmail.

Calendar, Camera, even the keyboard. All those default apps were filled with amazing little things. Many of which we STILL don't have in android today.

In third world countries the difference was even bigger. The keyboard suggested local words and names of local places (no system does that these days), the Nokia maps were far more reliable than Google's (my town had been split in half by a new train line and Google maps messed up their data with that, as some streets that used to cross the whole town now had multiple unconnected segments - if you tried to follow Google directions to a McDonald's in one of those segments, it would send you into a slum in another segment).

Plus, the whole UI was cool and the flipping tiles were quite useful.

this was a response worth reading. TY for the deets.

Loved my 920. HW was sleek and the live tile interface was years ahead of those silly round dots you got on iOS or Android. Sadly they were too late to the game to secure any app interest....oh...and they were Microsoft as well.

The app support was just so bad in a time where it couldn’t afford to be that bad. But yes windows phone 8 was my favorite UX for a smart phone ever

I actually had a W10 phone as my work phone. I had no issues with the OS, but app availability was absolutely abysmal. All the crazy W8 touch optimizations suddenly made a lot of sense. Too bad it died so soon.

I worked selling cellphones when Windows Phone was trying to compete. Their failure was lack of apps. From what I understand, it was difficult to port apps from Android or iOS to Windows Phone OS. It's a shame because the user experience was bar none. Hell, I installed a Windows OS theme on my Android for years. I still think they could make a comeback if they made an actual, honest to God Windows Phone that ran all Windows apps.

Xamarin was supposed to solve this. They even bought the fucking company.

I don't remember that. What is Xamarin?

It's a cross platform UI framework using C#/.NET, mostly cross-mobile-platform, although technically it could make Windows desktop UIs too.

They now spruke .NET MAUI (Multi-Platform App UI) as the new "write once, deploy everywhere" framework. I've not used it but it sounds good in theory 🤷‍♂️

It's very powerful. It's great for making desktop apps too if you're more used to using html and css for UI (if you use the Hybrid version - the standard uses XML exactly like Xamarin I believe). The only downfall it has at the moment is that it should also allow web deployment as a webapp too then it could be a true one and done framework.

You can get around it a bit by putting the pages into a library instead and have both a MAUI project and a Web so project that uses the same pages, just with different setups.

Ok now explain it for those of us who went to community college

It’s a thing programmers use to make apps on iOS, android, and (previously) windows phone. It lets you use Microsoft’s words to translate into word that can be understood by iOS and android.

Basically, if you're going to develop an app for different platforms (iPhone, Android, Windows desktop, etc), you usually have to have some/all of your code be specific to that platform. In some cases it may even have to be in different programming languages.

Xamarin is an attempt to let developers write code in one language (Microsoft's C# language), with one common set of code that can then be installed on many different platforms.

In reality, it's a little more complicated than that... but that's the goal.

Supposedly they eventually got android apps to run on windows phone directly, the app devs would only need to publish their Android app to wp. But if they actually got that far they never released such an option.

I've heard that the tech they got from developing this Android app support eventually turned into the WSL system on windows (the windows feature that let's you run a Linux kernel/terminal and subsequently, Linux programs)

Must've been WSL1 which they eventually abandoned. Trying to reimplement all the Linux syscalls on top of the Windows kernel was always going to be a neverending game of catch up.

WSL2 they just run an actual Linux kernel within Hyper-V

I used an Xperial back in high school too, it was better the Android and iOS in every way except the number of apps

I think this is a reason the Zune touch did poorly too.

Zune was not especially great in terms of what it could do, true, but the hardware was also shit. Also, the first gen Zunes all bricked at one point due to some programming error.

I could've sworn the Zune HD's specs were better than the current gen iPod touch.

If they wanted to compete today, they'd fork Android in a similar fashion to how Edge moved to Chromium.

Microsoft had every advantage. They were in the mobile space for years before Apple with PocketPC. They also had a freaking tablet.

They fucked it up with uninspired design (a start menu and task bar on a mobile?!) and lack of follow through.

Part of their issue is their desktop and x86 legacy apps ecosystem was no use on ARM touch devices.

But more competition than 2 would have been nice. We need stuff to move back to mobile web apps instead of apps. Then it's platform independence and the sandbox is interchangable.

Fuck you, I loved the design of windows phone. Bring able to size the tiles different and have them show content on the home screen was awesome. And the hardware was cool too. I still look at the photos I took on my windows phone and compared to my galaxy s22 ultra they still look just as good if not better in some cases.

Honestly the wort thing about win phone was salty developers who not only refused to port apps over no matter how easy MS made it, but also went well out of their way to shut down any community apps made using their API, like the Snapchat dead did.

I’m not talking about windows phone, I’m talking about PocketPC

There was also Windows CE, which was a real shitshow. I had a Vadem Clio, which I still wish I had because I was a beautiful piece of hardware... but it was so hampered by having Windows CE installed on it.

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He finally admitted to it. I was a Windows Phone user until the end. It’s sad that it was discontinued.

I was about to buy my first one when they discontinued them, they looked pretty dope!

Dropping their plans for Continuum was foolish. Now we have fully featured Linux-based phones like the PinePhone that succeed where Microsoft's plans for Continuum failed. (As in you can plug the PinePhone into peripherals for a desktop experience.)

Phones are pushing CPUs and RAM that are on par with laptops and desktops at this point. It seems a little superfluous if we're not allowed to do real computing on these machines. Continuum was what I saw as the future of General Purpose Computing, by taking the locked down OS design of smart phones and giving them a desktop experience when plugged into peripherals.

Once every phone is also a desktop, you suddenly have opened all kinds of options for people who only have a phone, and not a full computer. Which, last I checked, is the majority of internet users who access it via their phones. Continuum would have been a literal game changer, and they gave up on it.

It would become a situation where everyone is like "I already have my phone, I'm not even going to bring my laptop unless I need it for specific function." Because once your phone can be an on-the-go desktop, laptops will have less allure.

I don't even care about other features. The tiling home screen of the OS was really nice to use and when used properly by the apps could result in a "live" OS unlike the iconographic interfaces of iOS and Android. The homescreen was also old-age friendly and really a pleasure to use.

The OS ram like really smooth on 512mb RAM, unlike their counterpart android phones which were struggling back then with 2-3GB RAM.

The lumias themselves had a ton of useful features like tap to wake etc, which didn't consume much battery and in general the Nokia cameras were top notch for the time.

Basically, the OS got killed because of a chicken and egg problem with the apps, and the OS being from Microsoft, got a death knell because of the reputation. Also for some fucking reason, Microsoft decided that the already low userbase WP7s were to be depreciated rather than provide an upgrade path fo WP8 and WP10.

If you're on Android you should try Launcher 10. Very customizable Windows Phone tile interface. Although it has in-app purchases for a couple bucks each to disable ads and enable live tiles (they work really well) or alternatively a paid $0.99/month subscription for both. Still gets active support, as it just got one to improve support for foldable devices

Bro I kid you not the way that crazy OS took advantage of AMOLED for pure black backgrounds in every screen and along with a fluid interactivity, that design style was like a blessing from god.

Once every phone is also a desktop, you suddenly have opened all kinds of options for people who only have a phone, and not a full computer. Which, last I checked, is the majority of internet users who access it via their phones. Continuum would have been a literal game changer, and they gave up on it.

At the time when Windows Phone was released, the iPad had been released 7 months prior (both in 2010). It looked like consumers would continue to own a desktop or laptop computer, likely running Windows. It certainly wasn't clear that mobile phone and tablet computing power and functionality would rise to the point of consumers dropping laptops and desktops altogether as is happening today.

Choosing to back Continuum meant possibly losing two Windows desktop licenses, and possibly worse, an MS office license. Why would you need to buy multiple Microsoft licenses if your single Mobile Phone device held both your Phone, Mobile, and Desktop OS licenses, as well as your Office Suite license?

They weren't willing to risk current day (at that time) profits for a future selling fewer licenses.

They weren’t willing to risk current day (at that time) profits for a future selling fewer licenses.

That certainly matches their modus operandi. I would agree with this for the most part, but by 2010 they were already working on Office 365 and moving to the idea of Software as a Service. While Office 365 wouldn't be functionally available to everyone until later in 2011, it was clear they had plans to work around having a license tied to a device, and instead starting to roll out Microsoft Accounts to which the licenses would be tied.

Why would you need to buy multiple Microsoft licenses

This is really beginning to bug me. How much cool stuff and innovation have we lost out on because the companies have to put their bottom line ahead of making great, all-in-one devices. They’re all at it, and I’m sick of it.

Like, the iPad is an incredible bit of kit, absolutely hampered by iPadOS, because Apple are shit scared of people choosing to use just an iPad instead of buying that and a Mac. Imagine how great an iPad Pro running macOS could be. Full OS when attached to a keyboard, iPadOS when in tablet mode.

With Motorola’s Atrix we saw a future where a smartphone with a decent amount of power could be dropped into a laptop case and immediately become a fully fledged PC. Every major smartphone manufacturer could offer that right now, but they're too scared to cut into their revenue streams, so we end up getting offered the same shit every year.

We have Linux phones that succeed?

I guess I should have been more specific. They've succeeded specifically at what continuum aimed to do, which was allow a full desktop experience when plugged into peripherals.

Oh, right. True, that does work fine. The machines are powerful little computers after all.

Man, I'm still disappointed that canonical bungled their play for an Ubuntu phone. A seemless transition between phone and desktop with their OS would've been amazing.

It's really was.

Mistake for them but good for consumers. We all need more competition in this industry

Huh? How was cancelling the third most popular phone OS in the US good for consumers or in any way increasing competition in the industry?

As much as I dislike Microsoft, back in 2015 I used Windows Phone 8.1 for about 6 months and I absolutely loved it, the UI was so smooth and polished, even on low end phones, until WP10 came out and it ran like trash and I went back to LineageOS.

Microsoft didn't even provide a proper upgrade path for it's users. WP7 couldn't go to 8 and same for Windows Mobile 10.

Internally they were two very different things. WP7 was their old windows mobile with a new skin, while WP8 was the actual OS they had been working on for a long time. They felt the same but were very different. I guess they didn't think it was worth the hassle trying to figure out how to handle that update.

I don't know what was the deal with 10 though (I forgot it even existed tbh).

It is funny to me that they gave up on the Windows phone right when it was starting to actually kinda work and gain some market traction.

It was literally during an era where people were leaving iphone in droves (begrudgingly) for android. Windows phones could have easily stolen a ton of marketshare from Samsung and Google.

my favourite windows phone moment was when they had a funeral for the iphone lol

There really was something about the windows phone UI though. If you weren't around to try it, it's hard to properly explain how different and fresh the flat pane interface felt compared to iOS and Android. It really was a phenomenal design language compared to the same old thing in the market.

I honestly believe it they had just sucked it up and subsidized the cost of doubling the ram on those last Nokia devices, it could have been good enough to break through. Microsoft had everything possible to gain from integrating the desktop-to-mobile workflow for business clients. Then they threw it out the window...

Seriously, I doubt many people here who aren't used to corporate environments can fully understand how big the market was, that Microsoft gave up, by not spending enough to fill the BlackBerry hole that formed. They had 98% of the solution already developed, and fumbled the ball with a single yard left to go.

There was room for three players, if one of them actually serviced the business environment; and nobody was better positioned to do so than Microsoft at the time. Excel and PowerPoint that synced from your work machine, to the field, in a zero trust environment... Gah.. they were so close.

I had Lumia, on Windows 8 it was okayish, but when it moved to Windows 10...oh my god it was amazing. And the fact that you also got an amazing screen and amazing camera made the experience magical

They really needed to listen to their enterprise customers. Windows Phone could have easily taken over as the 'corporate phone', if it had any integration at all. With the side benefit that their corporate customers also employ the developers that could build out the apps they needed to create the marketplace.

Instead they tried to take on Apple and Google, in an end user space that had already been thoroughly saturated, with a product that was barely on par.

De-Googled android is what you want.

My first smart phone was a windows phone

Same, a Nokia Lumia 710. Lack of app support is what killed them. Even mainstream apps you had to have a third party version, Facebook, Insta, etc.

Which wouldn't have necessarily been a death knell, except by the point Microsoft had gotten their eggs into the Windows Phone basket, major platforms had already started shutting down functionality that could be accessed through third party applications so the App Store/Play Store official versions were the clearly superior ways to use the platforms.

In many cases, like with reddit even, third party applications are how many people have preferred to access these platforms, so long as the platform doesn't lock down the API to kneecap them.

I had one back in the day. I loved it honestly and was surprised they gave up.

Mine was too sort of. It was windows mobile 6 HTC shadow. This was before android and around the time iPhone was released.

Unless we’re counting the sidekick 2 as a smart phone, in which case that was my first.

HTC TyTN II. Loved that thing. Used to pay Age of Empires on it.

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THANK YOU! That's what we were all saying when you stopped caring about it.

In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.

I'm sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They've never done it before and it's just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft's best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn't enough.

Meanwhile, they've done really well with their "apps and services on every platform" approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of "mobile," but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.

The windows phone was not out for very long. It is unknown if it would have succeed, but at the time Android was an also ran as well, and non-smart phones still dominated. Blackberry was still a major player to beat at the time. Windows if they stuck with it might have done reasonably well. It would never have become a monopoly, but we cannot know how well it would have done.

To be fair, Windows Mobile had been out for many years. The very first convergence phone I ever used was a Windows Mobile phone, iPaq 6315 or something like that, a solid 2 years before the first iPhone came out. Still used a stylus, but it was showing us what the future was.

I think it's a safe prediction considering the number of large manufacturers that have gone under between then and now leaving us with just the Galaxy, IPhone, and Pixel outside of remaining 'boutique' manufacturers that don't really sell any volume.

A lot of businesses use windows as their main OS for people to use, MS could have used that skew to get a foot in the door with the windows phone. It would have been incredibly helpful and convenient for those business folks / office workers to be able to use all their windows stuff on their phone seemlessly.

TBH i feel that door hasn't closed yet if they made a real category breaking new entry like a dedicated business phone that was like windows but on your phone.

Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work. Apple, meanwhile, licensed Microsoft Exchange for iPhone and basically established Microsoft’s entire product strategy under Nadella: providing high-margin services on whatever device people actually want to use.

Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work.

good point, i had no idea

Especially with Microsoft Teams. Teams is such a powerful application for businesses. It's a pain in the ass to use on my work iPhone. ID love to have MS Phone again. They were well built and I never had any software or battery issues.

They definitely did with Surface. They stumbled for a bit but the Pro 3 - 4 made 2-in-1 laptops actually good.

Microsoft made a decent touchscreen Windows laptop, but that’s a niche within a shrinking market. I don’t think they did much to reinvent the category. It’s better, but it’s not a fundamentally different product than what was for sale 20 years ago.

They also botched the implementation of Android on Windows. They just don't understand the market.

Outside of Azure, and Business apps they don't really understand any of the other markets they are in.

And the only reason those are successful is because they're just very entrenched in large corporations. They're successful if the users are forced to use their stuff, but nobody loves anything Microsoft makes, so they always fail on the consumer side (Xbox and gaming in general being the exception, I guess).

nobody loves anything Microsoft makes

Excel is life. Although I do get annoyed about the data limitations.

Excel is their best product. But it literally came out in 1987 and has some of the same limitations… from 1987.

My life would change drastically for the worse without Excel.

That’s true of Xbox too. Two decades and all they have to show for it are the same washed up IPs from 15+ years ago, and a large checkbook. They acquire studios and IPs and bring them down to mediocrity.

Yeah, I guess here it applies as well, nobody loves windows or the Xbox itself, they just love the games that are exclusively there.

There aren’t many exclusives, and recently they’ve been bought. Forza is one of the only that come to mind when thinking of in-house.

It's never too late for another try, when you got a few billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket. There is a market for it, if done right.

They'd have to have a significant USP, they'd be competing with 2 extremely mature OSs

Android Subsystem for Windows

Windows Phone was my favourite phone OS. I loved my Lumia 925.

I think they can still reboot with an Android base. They can just do what they did for edge. Pull a Google. Sell hardware with very polished software. Android would give them full access to all Android apps. Also they already have outlook and office apps made for android.

Honestly I would rather see a large company like Microsoft build their own OS from the ground up. Without play services you wouldn't be able to use a lot of play store apps even if you installed the apk file. I think Google provides a lot of baked in services to developers to lock their apps into the google ecosystem. Microsoft wouldn't really add anything of value to android in my opinion, we already have one big company looking over our shoulder, I don't think we need a second. I think the Amazon Fire phone proves that even with a lot of money to burn it's hard to break into google's market.

Microsoft making their own platform that is not UNIX-like would probably get a lot more interest than just modifying android.

They are going to have the same problem they had with their original phones. No apps. They could never get enough developers to care about the OS without a user base. You also can’t get a user base without apps. That’s what killed the windows phone.
Amazon tried to use the kindle formula on a cell phone. The problem is that the main reason the kindle was successful was there was no real competition. They also only need to provide books not apps for the kindle. The cellphone market was a lot more mature with a ton of options. They came in with a mediocre phone that had less apps and less configurability. They tried to do the Apple walled garden on an Android phone. Clearly they didn’t understand their market.

I don't think there is all that much money in handsets, which is why every phone company does their own weird version of Android to try to get advertising revenue on the back end.

That is correct. The money is made on the searches. With their own phones, they can push their own search engine and Ads. Google did it so they could force other makers to standardize. Microsoft can do the same thing. You make money the store. Android just makes it easy to port apps to Microsoft’s app store Developers won’t be required to code a new app just for Microsoft.

Android open source bits are fine and all, but a lot of apps require Google Play Services which is not open or free.

Google Play Services has some quite strict requirements to adhere to in order for Google to licence that to you.

This includes have certain Google apps preinstalled on the device. Including Chrome.

I also doubt Microsoft would be happy with Google having the ability to cut them off whenever they damn well please.

There are a ton of phones in China running Android without google services . If you try to cut off Microsoft you would also be hurting all those Chinese phones. Google also can’t do that without being sued by Microsoft for not allowing competition.

Well, the idea behind FOSS is that you can share the common stuff and build your own stuff on top and while doing so improving the common stuff, testing uncommon usecases and adding features.

Personally I would love to have another bigger company working on Android next to Google, because that means they would (hopefully) implement their own "google services", to not rely on Google.

If that takes off, then apps will need to support both, making it more sensible to either create stable generic interfaces, where a third completly open-source implementation can more easily dock into, or not rely on them unnecessarily.

The only real problem with android is that the license is not GPL, so companies are not required to cooperate and likely end up creating their own silos.

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The UI seemed really good, I was really tempted. But I was ultimately thrown off by App support in general. Wasn't there a thing, that Apps often weren't equal to their Android and iOS counterparts?

Google actively blocked a ton of their stuff from being accessed from windows phones. They even deprecated some communication protocols in gmail to ensure some features of Microsoft's mail app would not work with Gmail (and then Microsoft found a way to make it work with an alternative protocol and Google went ahead and dropped that too).

YouTube could only be used in internet Explorer. Google refused to let Microsoft make a client for it or do one themselves. Some folks created third party clients for it but Google was quick to block them too.

Then Pokémon Go came out for iOS and Android and it was the nail on the coffin.

Edit: I forgot to mention Instagram, it was a big part of it too. I think this was before Facebook acquired them, because Facebook (and Twitter) were VERY well integrated into Microsoft apps on top of having their own apps available.

In general windows phone was the easiest platform to make apps for (I made a few), but there was a lot of sabotage from those big names. I was very conflicted because in one hand, Microsoft was tasting a bit of their own venom - as they had done the same sort of stuff so many times before, but in the other hand windows phone really felt like the best mobile OS and I wanted it to stay relevant.

Holy shit Pgo really was. I traded my LG lancet for an HTC One because pgo wasn't coming to windows.

And then it never fucking worked because Niantic "didn't anticipate the server load" of how many people wanted to play fuckin pokemon in the real world. That first year was a fucking shitshow. And I wouldn't trade the memories of walking around like a buffoon looking for a ghastly for anything.

I fucking loved when Pokémon go came it, it was so great, but a couple of months after it came out, I was going to the beach, and i was so excited. I figured, going to the beach, I would be swimming in water type Pokémon, then when I got there, I was like, oh, it's the same zubats at home. Never really played it after.

The HTC ONe was a gorgeous little phone. I miss it. One of my all-time faves and rock-solid build and one of the first to include an IR blaster - as the power button!

God knows what happened to it.

Yep, there was the app gap and then also the app support/feature gap too sadly

I used a Windows Phone way back in high school, I think it was an Xperia, the build quality was great and the performance was smoother than my friends' Androids and iPhones. Too bad there wasn't a lot of apps, that was the only down side though.

I really miss that UI, live tiles were so nice. there's launchers on android that mimic it, but it's not the same.

I had a Windows phone for years and loved it. But I'm glad it went the way of the dinosaur because it forced me to get a pixel which is even better.

pixel which is even better.

My dude that's downgrade lol

Phone companies are probably better off without Microsoft helping.

As long as they don't make another windows 8 style issue I don't see the issue of extra phone competition.

@Hypx Couldn't a current flagship run windows 11 without breaking a sweat? I'm sure there are some hardware architecture issues, but one has to wonder if a pocket size MS Surface with a 5G antenna isn't relatively straightforward to release.

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes.

Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nokia phone business.

Asked about a strategic mistake or wrong decision that he might regret, Nadella responds:

Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also slow to respond to Android and the iPhone threat, focusing the company’s efforts on Windows Mobile while famously laughing at the iPhone, calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”

“I regret there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows [Vista] that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone,” explained Ballmer.

The company is constantly updating its Phone Link app to link Android and even iPhone handsets to Windows, and Microsoft has a close relationship with Samsung to ensure its mobile Office apps are preinstalled on Samsung’s Android handsets.

The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 48%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

No it wasn’t. MS was well behind at the time, and the market had settled on Google and Apple as the two mobile OS providers. The mistake would have been to keep going.

You can consider me conspiracy theorist, but for me the whole story about WP/Nokia was to destroy the biggest non US tech giant, so the remaining are all US based. No one are now even close.

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