I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.
Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.
I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad.
It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time.
Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it.
Then windows 10 came and it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. The Live-Tiles got even worse since you couldn't programm them like the windows 8 ones. Just a whole mess. Couple that with the hillariously bad store interface (backend aswell as frontend) and 0 User engagement and it was bound to fail (as will all UWP apps)
You guys build a, I'm sorry to say but after 3 years of frustration it's fair to say, half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android, restricted the developers unecessarily, broke compatibility once a year requiring a complete rewrite and frankly build a product that only microsoft liked but was universally hated by their users.
It's a story of too little too late and a whole lot of arrogance on microsofts side.
Oh and don't even get me started on microsoft completely ignoring the european market where they actually got up to 15% marketshare of new devices sold for a while.
The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.
There's a semi-contradiction in your post that I think speaks to some of the issues MS had:
"It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported "
"half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android"
As someone who played around with WP7 when it first came out, I'd argue that the Metro UI was the best one available at the time. But the side effect of that is that it was different, and difficult to adapt an existing app to.
Essentially, MS needed to make a bold new platform with inventive new features, but also make the platform very compatible with the other major mobile platforms. You can't easily square that circle. Now, MS also messed up in a million and one ways (like my phone never getting a WP8 upgrade...) but I think their fundamental challenge was very, very difficult.
> that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android
According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones[1] and Android[2] didn't have at least at the time. In addition continuum is unique/better in many ways although that is more recent. It has been a while since I have used a Windows Phone.
I had the same experience while working on WP in 2012-13.
In early 2013, I reported a bug when some of the elements inside LongListSelector would disappear randomly on scrolling. LongListSelector is WP’s counterpart for iOS’s tableView.
So I started a discussion on Microsoft forums on this bug. Someone from Microsoft confirmed this bug.
I tracked this bug for 9 months. And guess what they never fixed it. They never fixed a critical bug in the most used UI component of mobile apps.
> it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved.
A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare, but these apps keep getting cranked out. The Android / iOS language and platform api's are SNAFU, but people get still get into the IDE and start making, without any promise for a set of conversion-frameworks + XML files that will make the app for All The Things. At the rate an app builder is adding features, the universal-platform paradigm is cognitive overload.
I think a No-XML based approach to app development, similiar to VB6 / VBA, would have been greatly appreciated. If MS gives me a stable API to an email client, a calendar, a shared drive, and a messaging or video chat service, I'd spend the 5 hours to automate a 5 minute inconveneince. A windows phone with a bunch of "lifehacks" apps would tremendously useful to much of the smartphone market, as long as they had the cant-live-without-apps too.
> Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it.
What was so horrible about it? I almost invested in a surface just off the strength of the UI; I rather liked that they were trying to merge desktop and tablet. Why was the experience so bad?
Good to hear from someone who was valiantly trying to create apps for this platform. I always wondered why developers never flocked to the MS platform since it always seemed wide open with not a lot of competition compared to the IOS and Android platforms.
This reminds me of a Timer app I downloaded when I had a HD8 that didn’t actually alert you when your time was up because of the way the native Alarm SDK was written (something to do with being unable to dispatch an alarm notification at exactly a given time). It made things...difficult.
This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement of that app and other flagship apps was not a core focus. Work was outsourced and not given enough resources. Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. From my prospective the focus was on filling the store with apps regardless of quality. This convinced the first generation of Microsoft loyalists to buy Windows Phones, but turned off many of those people. Most would not go on to buy a second WP or recommend them to friends and family. This includes many (dare I say most) Microsoft employees who where enthusiastic about the product at first, but when it came time to buy a second or third device moved on to Android or iPhone.
I was going to chime in a little on it being a stretch. One of the promotions for students they did was near the summer of 2012 or 2013. The promotion was you got paid 100 dollars for every app published on the Microsoft store limit 5 for the mobile store and 5 for the regular store. So a total limit of $1000. My school actually had a Microsoft rep run a workshop over a weekend showing students how to publish an app on the store. He gave us a template for a number of apps to "test" with. I made about $300 that weekend by publishing 3 different variants of a wackamole game. The workshop I attended had about 25 students total and we all left publishing at least one app. Idk how wide spread this outreach was. I checked on my apps sometime last year and they were all still up. I ended up pulling them out of a mix of shame and embarrassment.
The problem with WP was that it was late and offered nothing very special to consumers over android/iOS (and ya, I loved my 920). Consumers had no reason to buy it, developers had no reason to dev for it, a huge vicious circle that would have been difficult to break under the best of circumstances. The war was lost when the WinMo 7 team decided to after Blackberry in 2007, ignoring the iPhone as consequential, requiring that dev/design reset later that was just too late.
Man the more comments I read the more I begin to remember. There was ONE dev who was churning out VERY high quality apps to popular platforms. I think Snapchat or Instagram was what he got known for. Instead of MS embracing his work and helping it flourish, they let him get taken down by a C&D.
The problem with windows phone / mobile is not the apps. It was Microsoft.
When Apple launches an Phone, it’s avaliable world wide. When Microsoft launches a phone, it’s avaliable in America.
My last windows phone was a Lumia 925, the last Lumia announced I waited 7 months for it to reach singapore before throwing in the towel and going android.
There were no phones avaliable outside America, uk, Australia.
Now I use iPhone. I have no sympathy for Microsoft in regards to it’s phone biz because it didn’t try to break the market.
You don't know how untrue this is, couple of things. First lets start with this qoute
"According to Kantar's October 2013 report, Windows Phone accounted for 10.2% of all smartphone sales in Europe and 4.8% of all sales in the United States."
and then this one
"Microsoft announced new data from IDC indicating that Windows Phone is the second-most-used mobile platform in Latin America."
Lastly, do you not remember the launch of the iPhone? Not only was it only available in the US, you could only get it on AT&T.
There can be many reasons Windows Phone failed, but what you've mentioned isn't one of them.
This. I knew everyone from seniors, the a police chief, to tech folks carrying Windows phones. The apps we needed were there. But Microsoft had a nearly-useless approach to hardware releases, they constantly missed the boat.
I currently carry the last Windows Mobile phone on Verizon (the US' largest carrier). It is from 2014. (Actually, a new Elite x3 is coming out next week, three years later.) This is ridiculous. When the Elite x3 originally came out, we wondered what insanity was someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users.
They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones.
The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms.
O365 is a great example... the office platform should be an amazing mobile platform that drives all sorts of interesting things. But as an O365 customer, Microsoft just uses it as a lever to push their MDM product (you cannot configure Office apps without Microsoft stuff).
MDM is a pure commodity play. Microsoft would rather made $4.99 month on Intune than capture business process on their platform, which is worth 10x more.
Meanwhile Apple treats everyone pretty equally, and you can actually get stuff done.
I said this 20 years ago and it is still true today... Microsoft should spin off Office, server and client into different companies. Office could be an exponentially more valuable cash cow without being dragged down by the shitshow of Windows. Windows on client is a legacy product providing solutions to problems that people don’t have. Office is fundamentaly a more valuable platform.
Where I work, PC users spend more time in Outlook any other application. Browser and Word account for about 50% and 25% less time on average. So why are we presenting this UI optimized for computing circa 1997 where people run lots of little apps? Apple got this right by making iOS very low touch.
I'm not sure what your beef with Windows as a client OS is but if you're saying that the UI should be dumbed down, remember how the attempt to do so with Win8 backfired and that Microsoft quickly reverted most of those changes in Win8.1.
As the older generation is dying off / retiring, the percentage of people who have been using a computer for a long time has increased immensely, the "secretary who can't figure out copy/paste" issue is becoming less relevant every day. These days the only people I need to help do basic tasks in Windows are my retired parents.
I don't see how an iOS-like UI would be an improvement for virtually anything I can imagine doing on a Windows PC.
Having done my fair share of windows phone app development (8.0, 8.1, 10) I can confirm. Microsoft incentivized app development, and paid top game development companies millions and gave them featured placements for their half-assed windows phone ports.
And then as a regular joe you would actually put in the effort* to get things working well. Then you would watch these bug-plagued big name 3-star ports appear out of nowhere and usurp you on the top free lists and search results due to their favorable placements. And then you would move on to a fairer market, and when microsoft stopped paying them, the big app developers did too (not that they ever updated or fixed the bugs on windows phone releases.)
* Difficult as windows phone was the only mobile platform not supporting openGL in hardware and the top sold windows phones were incredibly low spec.
A couple of years ago we sent two people to a meeting at Microsoft to talk about a port of an existing Android/iOS app. The work was already funded so we were really just hoping for a free phone or two.
The report I heard back was that they treated it as an opportunity to try to sell us Office 365.
(The port never happened because the client's plans to roll out Windows phone to their staff fell through some time later.)
Windows phones themselves are fine. But two things were massive failures:
1. Microsoft created development tools that are not appropriate for real-world use cases and tried to push that on devs and companies, which failed spectacularly. The demand for apps which work on Windows desktop and Windows phone literally doesn't exist. It doesn't matter that Microsoft would have loved it if people built apps like that. If there is no demand for such apps they don't get built (and they didn't). You get garbage (compared to WPF or even WinForms) "metro" or whatever you call them now desktop apps that are intensely hated by Windows users and you get a WP app that you can't reuse to build an iOS or Android app... The UI was also completely different so you couldn't even really reuse much of the design. So no code sharing, no design sharing.
What .NET devs wanted was a way to build apps using C# that work on all mobile platforms (we never cared about a mobile app working on desktop). If you had given us that you would have had your apps purely by virtue of piggybacking on iOS, Android and .NET popularity. We complained about the retarded "multiplatform within the Windows ecosystem" approach from day 1 yet Microsoft released several iterations (not backwards-compatible, of course, so they were losing some devs each time) of this garbage before finally listening to the market and embracing Xamarin at which point it no longer mattered as WP was a joke. A LOT of people love C# and are willing to jump through hoops to develop multiplatform apps with it. XAML is also very cool. Microsoft had that part in the bag, yet completely failed to use this to their advantage. Imagine if when WP7 (or even WP8) was released Microsoft was able to say "here, you can now develop mobile apps in C# and they will also build for iOS and Android!" .NET devs would have jizzed in their pants.
2. Microsoft threw the existing WP users in the trash with WP7 -> WP8. My iPhone updated for like 7 years through god knows how many iOS versions. When I bought a new one, it felt almost exactly the same except faster due to better hardware. People were wary of buying a WP because they got burned once.
Heh. I was an intern there when this happened. In fact I think I was in the float in front of this one. To be honest this was blown out of proportion a bit. It was an internal celebration of release, and each team picked a theme. Most in good fun. In retrospect the funeral themed-one... yeah... didn't age well, and was perhaps in bad taste (I can't recall which team this was). It was just a bunch of overworked PMs, devs, and testers having some fun and blowing off steam.
>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.
The one thing MS didn't try to incentivize independent app developers was to eliminate the 30% revenue cut MS would take on the sale of paid apps. I always thought it would have been a good differentiation as there were always complaints that it was getting too hard to for indies to make it in the iOS app store. Even if MS would have said they were waiving the commission during an introductory period of a few years it might have helped. It seemed penny wise, pound foolish to think they could charge the same skim that Apple does.
I recall they announced promotions like that as well. At one point I recall they would auto-cut at least in half for some amount of time if your app was chosen for the front page of the Store.
Since the Anniversary Update last year, sideloading has been enabled by default, too, if you wanted to sell apps outside the store, and that didn't magically attract indies either.
> For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc
I remember some of this vaguely. A friend of mine deep in the MS world was showing me some of what was going on, but this "ran promotions" - I dunno. I don't think I'm way out in "non-MS" land - I keep my finger on the pulse of a lot of tech communities. I didn't hear much about this except from a few friends deeply entrenched in MS. Perhaps there wasn't enough of an outreach program?
> Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time.
Given that I've registered multiple times with them to download various SDKs in the past, perhaps... emailing me about what they were doing, because I might have had an interest in being part of that app development push?
Maybe some actual ads on non-MS tech-related websites, or outreach to local non-MS user groups might have helped? As someone who's run multiple local tech groups, and frequented many for years, this "big focus of microsoft" was never a blip on anyone's radar (AFAICR).
> giving away free phones
That's sort of the bare minimum you'd need to do.
I'm reminded a bit about the HP tablets with webOS. They charged $499 (because, IIRC, "that's the price for tablets" - because of iPads), sold for a few weeks, then discontinued. Loads of people picked them up at $150-$200, even with no apps. "Well, we can't win, let's close it all down", after spending $1B+ on acquiring the stuff they're giving up on in the first place.
That move was likely political. Half the leaders internally wanted to let it die but to shift blame they let "the other team" launch it anyways to let it fail and say "told you so".
I remember that story for tablets. Same was with Amazon Fire Phone.
But i don't know how you can write off $1B... because honestly even iPod or iPhone wasn't successfully from the beginning. So they invest years for that status.
Competitors make clones, release them and after two months declaring abandoning market. Totally non-sence for me!
I loved the UI, design, consistency, etc. I liked it because it was straightforward and rarely notified me about anything.
I left because of w10m specifically. They took away the consistency. It felt as janky as Android does.
After I dropped and broke my last WP8 device, I had to decide whether I wanted to order another old WP8 phone online or just switch to Android. I switched to Android.
It's not nearly as nice as WP8 was but what can you do?
Your post and his comment do not contradict one another. Or rather, your interpretation of the data in that post is shaky.
Consistent with the data presented in that post:
-I download lots of one-time-use apps. They're useful, and I won't use a phone without them, and then uninstall them in a week (eg, city specific apps when traveling)
- I download lots of special use apps that contribute few app-hours most of the time, but are super critical when I need them (hiking apps when hiking, service-specific references when I'm working in the relevant department, etc)
-I download games (lots of them), play with them for a while, and then uninstall for a new game. Yeah, most are gone in a week or a month, but the ongoing process is valuable to me.
(Edit addendum:
-I have apps I use quasi-frequently and that contribute very few app-hours of interaction, but are still valuable. Eg, the couple minutes a day I use a task list, the five minutes a week I use FreshDirect, etc.)
And then, yes, there are a handful of core apps that get most of my usage (outlook, kindle, Netflix, messages, safari).
This is entirely consistent with those stats, and still places enormous value on the app ecosystem.
> They may have an additional 25 to 30 apps installed, but only five of those are heavily used. The five non-native apps vary from user to user
Doesn't that suggest that while individual users only use a few apps, the union of apps that see significant use is much larger? So you need a wide variety of high quality apps to please a majority of users.
So it's not "none of my apps are available". It's more like "that one app that my gym uses for booking is iOS/Android only" or whatever. Finding a decent WM8 podcast app was virtually impossible back when I had a Lumia, IIRC.
The data you posted do not support the claim “People don't even use apps”, but instead only “most individual users do not regularly use a large number of apps”. But that doesn't mean that either the small number they use frequently or the larger number that they use infrequently are unimportant to the overall utility they derive from their phone, or that there aren't a large number of apps used regularly across any given platform.
Yeah, I think that the focus on apps might have actually been part of their problem. How many consumers really saw anything about the platform that made it more appealing than competing platforms? Without a solid killer feature as a differentiator, the apps wouldn't matter.
I'm sure that it made a great measurable and a great excuse for failure, though. I don't doubt that the internal narrative would focus on that.
> Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.
Anecdote from a lot of my friends, a lot of use use flashcard type apps to help learn languages and things like memrise etc... Dictionary apps to get word translations and so on.
So I'm going to place that article under: perhaps true in general, but not overly constructive to my group of people.
> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.
From my experience, that wasn't the case. I didn't own a Windows Phone but one of my friends did. According to him, what forced him to move was an overload of animations which became very irritating. I can recall a comment that suggested how Windows phone exploited animations to cover the fact that it was too slow.
Yep, that’s exactly the reason why I hated it. Those animations looked nice at first but after a while they get so annoying and even launching a dialer took much longer than needed because of those flight animations.
Also I did not like the flat look and flat colors. All the apps looked the same, so did the icons. The best thing about App Store on iOS was the colorful variety of apps where each of them had a unique distinct look and it was a joy to expolore new wild apps on the marketplace.
Several of my friends and I loved Windows phone and I hate Windows (prefer Linux). Sounds weird, but I've always thought Windows Phone to be more elegant than Android.
Back in 2011, I bought an HTC HD7 from a friend who switched back to Android. I was very impressed by how fast Windows Phone 7 was especially the ultra-smooth scrolling. But, like you said, the animations were enough to drive you nuts. Way too much, I don't know what to call it, "swoopy" maybe. It was enough to make you dizzy. I ended up trading the phone for a Galaxy S and that was the end of Windows Phone for me.
Its a free market, and the market has spoken. I think its the right strategy for MS to accept that the market is just not going to accommodate yet another mobile ecosystem. And its not for lack of trying: they've been trying for over a decade now to break into the mobile OS market. They had tablets running a version of Windows much before iPad; they had "Smartphones" running windows much before 2007. There's gotta be something that they just can't get right about mobile OS (or probably its simply the fact that the market doesn't have space enough for yet another proprietary OS).
MS will do a lot better if it focuses on making android betters, supporting .NET apps in android (yay Mono!). Maybe in the future they could revisit the mobile OS thing and have better luck then but for the near future it looks very unlikely.
The mark of a good company is adaptability. Intel went from RAM chip maker to creating microprocessors, MS itself went from creating BASIC compilers to making OS's. With Azure, .NET, Office, Windows etc. I think they have enough areas to make money off. Its just their strategy of adapting windows to mobile devices didn't work.
> Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen.
Information changes but a UI should be static, a UI that changes based on what is available is a recipe for a poor user experience. I have a hard enough time navigating rows of icons (as opposed to a list of app names), I don't need the icons changing randomly.
Aside from that, one of the missing features of tiles was interactivity, on android I've had an MP3 player widget on my home screen since I first got an HTC hero and playing music is a core feature for my phone. As flashy as tiles were they didn't have that level of functionality.
That is pretty much the reason I didn't have a Windows phone. I would have considered it if it actually did promise privacy.
Free phone sounds nice, but tinkerers like me don't want to apply and get the approval lottery for shit. We wanted cheap phones. The Android ecosystem at that time was already matured to the point that you can get cheap no frills, no worries if you break it secondhands. It was an obvious choice when I could get a secondhand Android phone with all the stuff I could tinker with for $100, and that also gave me the unexplored freedom to get any ROM I want. I remember porting Cyanogenmod 9 on my shitty 2 year old OG Motorola Droid, and control every aspect of it.
I bought someone a Windows phone and they had the same feedback - big name apps not available (whatsapp, instagram, etc.)
I wanted to buy a Windows phone since I use none of these apps, but there was no hardware refresh or major announcements around Windows phones and that deterred me. I don't understand how MS went on to a successful Surface and failed phones, I would think they're similar markets - hype-driven, takes a few iterations to get right, etc. I bought the Google G2 and it was far from what an Android phone is today, but Windows phones seem to run on a no-upgrade strategy which is strange
I think that's close to the truth but really there has never been any product direction or commitment from MSFT. why would you build a product on that?
Surface isn't successful. It's a disaster. Just a well covered up one so far. Give it a couple of years and it'll be down the toilet as well. Consumer Reports dumped on them last year with a 25% failure rate within 2 years. Rather than deal with this, they go into denial and market market market mode.
The problem is that they're building products they want, not what the user wants. And when the user asks for something, they just say NOTHING and drown out all the negativity with blogs and hype and pointless communication paths to pacify the users who are pissed off.
On top of all that there is this personality cult around Satya where everyone is saying he's the second coming, the saviour and all that junk. Turns out that it's blinded marketing, the enterprise customers are getting shafted (me) and footing the bill for cock up after cock up after cock up.
Quality is gone. Privacy is gone. No one says anything. Everyone is voting with their feet.
There's definitely a shortage of apps compared to Android and iOS but I have WhatsApp and Instagram installed on the Windows Phone I'm writing this comment on right now. You can tell the Windows Phone version of apps are not a priority for the developers though.
I stopped using the windows for the same reason. I loved that I could buy a performant phone for $50 when my $200 Android feels sluggish. But I hated not having any apps.
Specifically I hated all the shitty apps that had flooded the app store because of their half baked promotions.
All of their promotions incentivized churning out a bunch of shitty apps. Like paying people $100 per app, this created a lot of crap in the app store to wade through to find quality apps.
Instead they should have matched revenue or paid an extra 5 cents per download. Something to incentivize a dev to write one good app instead of 5 throw away apps.
Yeah, I won a WOWZAPP competition by making an HTML5 game in 2 days, wrapping it up in a Windows 8 app and publishing it to store. I got a Lumia 800 for it which ran Windows phone 7. When they already had Windows 8 devices out and the competition was to make Windows 8 apps. I still don't know what they expected me to do with this obsolete phone.
That phone was useless to me because there were literally no apps on the Windows 7 store. When I tried to sell it few days later, no one was even willing to consider it and I had to sell it for peanuts.
Take a look at another platform that Microsoft pushed into: game consoles. How did they break into game consoles? They bought an entire game studio, Bungie, and produced one of the most best selling games of all time (Halo) as an exclusive title. Nothing Microsoft did with Windows phone was on remotely the same scale. The fact that a movie of that scale would have been vastly more costly than the acquisition of Bungie and development of Halo is merely an indication of the fact that MS waited too long, not that nothing could be done.
The fact is, you should incentivize funders/investors, not developers. The developers will follow if they have a hot new startup where they can (potentially) mint money using your seed capital.
However, I agree this only works if you aren't seriously late to the party.
There's an obvious incentive they haven't tried: guaranteeing a lower app store margin like 1-2% instead of the 30% cut that Microsoft currently takes.
Google and Apple have already convinced a sufficient number of users users that their app stores are essential, so they can continue to charge whatever they like.
Microsoft didn't have the same luxury, so they needed to change this. They never made the change and it's too late now, but I think if they did this a few years ago they would be in a better position.
>they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.
Is anyone else surprised that "giving away free windows phones" was not a recipe for success in terms of incentivising capable app developers?
Most every app developer already owns their favorite phone because they can afford it.
They should have also given away free phones to end users. And for the other users who bought stuff, they should have given them 100$ of credit to buy apps.
And then periodically rewarded great users with 100$. it would have been like a tax break for the users to spur the app economy.
The lack of apps was annoying at time, but what made me leave was probably Microsoft Edge. The rendering was clearly better than IE, but Edge would crash my phone, or become non responsive, or both so often (creators update on Lumia 640 LTE). If the browser doesn't work, and there are no apps, it doesn't make sense to have the phone.
I don't understand why Microsoft has keep IE/Edge around. It's just embarrassing. Event my technology illiterate friends and family rag on IE and everyone installs chrome these days. If they spend less time building IE and focused on other platforms they'd waste a lot less time for everyone including themselves.
I really would love to see a Microsoft mobile device. My issue was lack of available devices on my carrier, and when I did find them they hardly were competitive with the available Android alternatives. I hope Microsoft does return to the Mobile OS market, but I hope they pull all the right moves off to get real traction going. I still remember having a code to be a Windows developer for free as a student but never had the time to build any apps so I never took advantage of my developer code.
I do hope Microsoft returns back at it someday. I hope they bring out "Super Phones" on every major carrier that truly compete. Also hope they don't bring some of the pain points of Windows 10 (forced updates, forced telemetry and what not). Google and Apple need a serious competitor. Ubuntu bailed and I wish they had not. It seems like a very specialized OS needs to be built and it needs to hit market on all major carriers with new things to offer that are worthwhile. Privacy would be a strong selling point if anyone else attempts it. I want a privacy focused and open source mobile alternative, feels like I'll wait a long time for it though. Microsoft has the resources to provide such an alternative though... Would be definitely different if they went that route.
Being able to compete is mostly having an app platform on par with iOS or Android. Precisely the point where Windows Phone is lacking. This is a situation I don't see changing, especially not without hardware.
Furthermore, releasing a phone with good hardware at a competitive price point means either losing money to push into the market (which I think MS has done the past few years with their mobile offerings), or having a supply chain to have good hardware at a low-enough price (something which Apple and Samsung already have).
I kinda doubt there will be a good third mobile option again. The choices currently are to target iOS to make money, or Android to reach more users and for most apps there's isn't much point in supporting anything else. Plus, there aren't that many apps built upon frameworks that would allow easy addition of a third build target.
There also doesn't seem to be much point in offering an open-source mobile platform. The partners you need to convince to offer phones with your platform don't care (much) whether it's open-source or proprietary. In Android's case the open-source-ness pretty much only matters for Amazon and a tiny fraction of users that install custom builds. Google has certainly tried to wrestle as much control of the platform back, both for control reasons, and to be able to provide a better user and update experience (Things a hardware vendor won't care much about. They make money when you buy the phone, not when you use it.).
I used to be a MSP from Mango to WP8.1. I will always be impress by everything MS did for devs and students. If you have the will to build an app, you could have, to help you, free licenses, free marketplace, free phone and tablet to test, free ms dev time to help you, free commercial time to help you share you app, free press coverage, free conferences, etc.
They did so much, sometimes I felt impostor to don't do more. So much money was here to support.
That was Apple's strategy. They built some really great Mac OS X apps when they were the underdog, and offered them for free with the hardware. They also built (and bought) some great Pro apps which attracted a ton of customers. The iLife suite and even the iWork suite to some extent (I loved Keynote in college) were essential to me making the switch.
I wonder what would have happened if they competed on pure price. Like if they basically gave away 10m devices. That’s a small amount but it could have kickstarted something. App developers have to choose which platforms to support. The cost is nearly doubled if you go from just one to both dominant platforms. Adding a third would nearly triple it. It is not worth it if suddenly you can reach a whole lot of people. Going after developers is good if there isn’t a market already. Going after consumers might have created a critical mass where developers would have just showed up on their own.
Maybe a campaign to hand a new Windows phone to every college kid on campus would have worked. College kids aren’t flush with spending money, so a free phone would be a boon. But college kids also graduate and get jobs, making future phone purchases a possibility. Plus college kids tend to be trend setters for technology in situations like this.
Eh, I am rambling. People much smarter than me have probably already thought of this.
I'm still on the platform as well (typing this on a Lumia 635). To be honest I only bought it as I wanted a cheap smartphone but it's served me very well. I don't really use that many apps (Baconit and Metrotube are the two I use the most), but the WinPhone 8.1 UI is probably the best phone UI I've ever used (I prefer it over iOS and Android). Thankfully I've already got my next phone lined up (Librem 5).
The platform will still be supported, but new hardware or features won't be coming, which is fine with me. If anything, I'll stick with MS for now and then switch to IOS sometime in the next few years.
You can still get the new HP Elite X3 and the Lumia 950 and 950XL on ebay for around $300.
Me too, guess I'm going to have to make this phone last until another alternative to iOS and Android appears. I've preordered a Purism Librem 5 as part of their crowd funding campaign so hoping maybe that comes to something.
I couldn't find any incentives as a solo game developer earlier this year. I developed a game with React Native and thought it would be interesting to release a Windows Phone [1] version... but it was not. I think I only had one person install it, and that was a friend who I asked to try it out. Of course, the main reason is probably that my game is just not very compelling, or I failed with marketing. But I definitely won't be launching any more apps for Windows.
I would have loved to get a free Windows phone so I could have tested the game on a real device, but it makes sense that they can't just give away phones to random indie developers.
My wife complains bitterly that she is unable to keep her Windows phone. I wonder sometimes if this ecosystem was killed by "expectation disease" where success was defined as '1/3 the market or better'. It is a common problem of insecure BigCorp type thinking when trying to break into a market, it has killed Google in the social space. This is the kind of issue that really needs a 'peanut butter factory'[1] approach.
[1] The 'peanut butter factory' has been a silicon valley euphemism for a small team of engineers from a "big" company that have gone off to build a new project without having the big company drag them down.
The best thing a new phone platform could do is essentially create an App building framework like React Native that allows developers to build apps targeting the new platform and the existing platforms at the same time(maybe not as a first class citizen initially, but those platform devs and fill in the blanks). That's about the only way that, as an engineer, I"m going to give a shit about developing for your app platform. If I care, and I make cool apps, then the user base size doesn't matter, I'll still target it because it makes my life better as a developer.
Yes! I love my Windows 8 phone! I hated Windows 8 for desktops because it felt like they were trying to turn my PC into a cell phone. But the design is great for an actual phone! Unlike on iOS, the app icons can be dynamic and you can change their size and what's displayed. My Lumia 928 feels better in my hand than anything else I've ever handled, and the screen contrast and true black is great, even in direct sunlight. I love having a dedicated camera button, too.
I actually don't personally care too much that there are so few apps.
I had a Windows Phone 7 and loved it but ended up not being able to afford the monthly payments at the time that was required for having a smart phone. I didn't have much of an app issue but that was because I didn't have the phone long enough. I have a co-worker that also had a Windows phone as his previous phone and liked it. He wanted to get another when it was time to upgrade but he couldn't, there just wasn't any available.
Microsoft decided that a great way to get apps for their phone would be to make a UI for both desktop and phone and force developers to use it. In a single stroke they alienated all their existing desktop developers while forcing potential phone app developers to have to think about far more complex problems. Their message to developers was that they must learn something new. And so they did. XCode.
I got a Lumia 820 that way. I loved that OS and I'm sad it never got the recognition it deserved. If nothing else, a serious competitor to the other two major OSs with such radically different design might inspire Apple and Google to something beyond the tired old icons on a grid.
I loved it too, but my Nokia Lumia 800 never got updated. Loved the flow of things, it was fast, Whatsapp worked basically all I needed. But I did feel screwed as an early adopter. Why was I never able to run APKs? That would have helped so much...
We're a mid-size SaaS app and not a single person from MS made any sort of overture to us apart from "you should develop for Windows Phone!". It would have cost us like 100-200k and 9-12 months of developer time to do this. And then again for 10. And provide support for the rest of time. Nope!
We laughed at them in the background and awaited its eventual death. That we didn't put a single second of effort into developing for this platform has finally been vindicated! :)
Forcing devs to rewrite stuff every major release made it pretty clear no one there cared about developers.
>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc.
I remember they were giving Lumia 925's to computer engineering students here years ago if they made and uploaded an app. You can imagine the quality of the apps they were uploading. Most of them were slideshows or just a wall of text.
That's not how you incentivise app developers, that's how you inflate your numbers.
Back in the day the number of apps in the store was a major point in the mobile OS wars, though. Google and Nokia were both constantly compared to Apple and told how they need to improve.
And yes, one response was to inflate numbers with random crap. Nokia created a developer tool to convert web pages to native apps -- basically just a webview wrapper with bundled web content. Ovi Store was half full of these "apps".
I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast.
My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same.
A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost.
Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win.
Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...
It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.
I've got one in my pocket right now: Asus Zenfone 2. It just runs regular Android. Even has an "Intel Inside" logo on the back.
Windows has never had great dynamic scaling, so trying to run regular apps on a phone would be a nightmare of tiny click targets. Metro apps would scale better, but that was the whole point of UWP.
IMO they've given up slightly too early. They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer, or various other things, but Microsoft just can't handle a market where they aren't dominant. The only way they could leverage their dominance would be to break Exchange ActiveSync and say "if you want your calendar on your phone, it has to be a Windows phone".
And Intel have pulled back from the low-power area (mobiles, Edison) because they're not competitive there. Maybe the same "can't function when not market leader" problem.
Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything?
I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don't think they can compete.
Windows Mobile is my favorite example of ecosystems being more valuable than individual user experiences. They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS.
But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing.
All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance.
What I see are all the big players lining up to take a crack at Augmented Reality when the tech hits a sweet spot sometime in the next 5-10 years. That's the reason for the crazy investments in MagicLeap, etc. it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.
The irony of the Microsoft side of the story is that they tried many times to get into mobile. They had a full-powered smartphone, including apps and a web browser, for many years before the iPhone.
I remember going to a store around 2005 or 2006 and deciding, "if I can get slashdot to load, I'm going to buy this phone." I couldn't figure it out! I don't know if I just couldn't figure it out, or the phone was misconfigured, but either way, I just didn't want something so difficult to use in my pocket. From what I remember, the browser was buried under a tree of menus.
When I first tried the iPhone in 2007, it was very easy to figure out how to load slashdot!
Later, when someone showed me all the "cool" things about the Windows phone, they were just a snazzy UI that had totally unintuitive features that I would never use. I just couldn't see the point of the phone; except as a toy for people who like to tinker.
Tried? When the iPhone came out, Windows Mobile had already existed for 7 years and had 40%+ of the smartphone market. I'd say that's a little more than "tried".
WeChat has done that to some degree. Given that WeChat is basically a platform at this point, one could imagine a WeChat phone coming out in china, bypassing Android completely. Not sure what would be the point though.
A wechat phone would be obvious and I don't know why they don't do it. Remember that Google play and all the other play services are not available in China.
Let's see what will happen with the Purism Librem 5. Obviously, they just just a very small niche player, just like the Copperhead OS guys and Silent Circle.
> it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.
The difficulty there is at least 90% of the AR market will be passive experiences, and at least half of those will be hand held, which basically means Apple and Android have already won half of the AR market, they can just photocopy their way to market share the way Microsoft did in the 90s.
And the trouble for headset makers is that handheld market will put some serious network effect pressure on them.
The hope I see is that technical differentiation will provide the moat against Apple and Google, but I have a hard time imagining what tech is going to be so hard for them to copy.
The most sensitive users will just stick to handheld where fidelity doesn't matter. And the most adventurous users will just go where the content is. The HiFi segment is the entirety of VR early adopters right now, but I see them as a thin minority squeezed between those other groups in the endgame (motion averse and content focused).
Although fidelity has some virtuous cycles with content production. So there might be a strategy there for Facebook or Microsoft.
But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up,
But there was also a genuine sense of excitement about Windows Phone 7, they had some single-digit marketshare, the other ecosystems were not as big as they are now, and Android was pretty bad at the time.
I think one of their fatal mistakes was the Windows Phone 7 -> Windows Phone 8 transition where they left many early adopters out in the cold (IIRC none of the WP7 phones could run WP8).
I agree that building an ecosystem was a large part of the problem, but Microsoft also messed up royally by making a hard cut in the platform when it was just starting to take off.
Amazon is a bit of a weird one and it's hard to really say they "failed"
Their Fire phone failed, for sure, but they have had success with some of their Fire products. Fire TV is nearly as big as Chromecast & Roku, for example, all 3 of which dwarf Apple TV, and of course Kindle was a smashing success. The Fire tablet is also seeing some success.
But these products don't hinge on app support, crucially, they are just content delivery platforms for Prime.
By that logic Microsoft didn't fail because Office is still widely used.
Just because Amazon branded their phone under the same brand as their successful tablets and streaming sticks doesn't make the phone any less of a failure.
Facebook didn't fail. You are not seeing their moviment with React Native & open source ecosystem (and the people saying that FB is doing "free" work aren't seeing this either, as FB is looking for a big chunk in the app development, and getting it).
This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different .Net versions that are out there and what they mean from the top of their heads.
Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.
On one side, I'm glad that declarative app UIs can now be built on a web, on the other side - come on, Microsoft, we could have skipped a whole jQuery era and be somewhere else with the web now.
And react is still missing a big library of standard, well documented components with accesibility, performance and all the edge cases built in.
> Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.
I'd love if that were true, but of course the big selling point of React Native is that it works on several platforms. WPF works on one, and only a desktop one. Well, now that WP is dead at least.
If WPF ran on iOS / Android, hell even if it just ran on MacOS, I think there'd be a lot more devs building apps in it than JavaScript.
I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future.
Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy.
I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code bases that no longer run on the .Net core fall to significantly small fraction.
At that point there will just be 'one' .Net again, and it will be .Net core, on all platforms.
You might argue that Microsoft is a legacy beast, and they won't abandon their developers by dropping support for old versions, but they already are doing that in the 'you can install it, sure, but it'll never get any more updates' (#1, #2), so you know.
WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.
Had Microsoft's acquisition strategy been different, they could have significantly boosted WM's hopes. The lack of official apps for Whatsapp and Instagram on WP were user's biggest complaints by far. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014 for a combined total of $20 billion.
In roughly the same period, Microsoft bought Skype, Minecraft and LinkedIn for a total of around $36 billion, the bulk of that accruing to LI's price. I get that MS is enterprise-focused, but those prices seem completely out of whack with what they actually got in value. Whatsapp, Google and Apple all offer built in video chat for consumers and LI's value to anyone outside of recruiting agencies is dubious.
> LI's value to anyone outside of recruiting agencies is dubious.
This is exactly the reason why LinkedIn needed the acquisition. I agree with you that the $26B price tag makes no sense given that LinkedIn needed this deal more than Microsoft did.
> The software giant will pay $196 a share - a premium of almost 50% to Friday's closing share price.
I completely understand the acquisition of Skype which was the undisputed king of video chat in its prime. It has since languished for any number of reasons, (probably relating to Microsoft's management but I'm not sure).
But I agree, a decent acquisition strategy could have done wonders for their ecosystem. Instead of constantly making and shutting down competitors to popular products, buy the popular ones. There was a time before now when Evernote would have been a nifty target, before they collapsed under their need to make money. There are plenty of amazing music platforms that people care about which aren't Groove.
I'd completely forgotten that Microsoft had actually bought LinkedIn. Even though now I recall seeing the news, until you mentioned it I was thinking they just had a partnership or something going on.
I agree that they overpaid but I think you are missing something big: they didn’t buy LI to improve Windows Phone, they bought it to integrate with Outlook and give their Enterprise SAAS products like Dynamics an edge in the war with Salesforce. I work at a financial firm and LI is essential to the long sales process for our applications.
If only I could properly reprogram this WP8.1 phone I have here, it would've
been much more interesting.
But rooting/jailbreaking (in WP world called "Interop unlock") has always been
awkward and possible only for the most popular types of WP: Lumia, Samsung.
To write programs, it requires me to install Windows 8 or 10 — can't do with
Windows 7 or Linux.
Even if I write a program, this phone requires special developer unlocking
online for "sideloading" two apps maximum at a time, another arbitrary awkward
limitation which can be circumvented by shuffling around with an SD card:
loading an app into phone, moving the app to SD, disconnecting the SD, loading
another app and so on.
WP8.1 does have an ability to install an app from a file directly, but only if
it is signed with special enterprise signature, and that isn't cheap.
Of browsers, only IE and IE-based browsers exist for WP, and that means no
proper customization and of course no ad blocking.
So the platform looked quite hostile to me and I wasn't motivated to explore
any further.
And then those MBA types are wondering why their "business strategy" is not working. The same applies to the Windows Store on Desktop. All that walled garden nonsense they are trying to impose is not going to work. The only thing I could seriously recommend to those clerks is to eat their neckties and finally become living human beings.
The joke on Windows Phone was always the browser. It was essentially a stripped down version of desktop IE. They never fixed it - the only Microsoft phone to ship with a usable browser (Edge) was Windows 10 Mobile, and they silently killed the whole Microsoft smartphone product line on the same day it was officially released.
I think part of the problem is that they actually try to push innovation (e.g. new UI paradigms with Metro), but then run into several vocal minorities, backtrack a bit and try to find a middle ground. From the outside, it then looks like a random zig-zag course, but it's much more an iterative minimization of "mean square pain" among their fairly large user base.
I think it's more that they hire personalities and form personality cults. Personality cults can't be seen to fail by investors due to the CYA culture so they just burn off a cliff and explode when they hit the bottom of the ravine.
My first memory of windows phone was running wp7 on an htc hd2. At the time it was curiously interesting since I was writing code with WPF. In the beginning were definately some interesting aspects on paper - the legitimized 'jailbreak' mode, decent multi-tasking for it's time, writing apps with visual studio/c# (which felt much better than xcode at the time, and had a community defining many of the initial reactive/mvvm work used in many places today). But watching friends purchase Lumias that didn't get updates for wp8 months later showed just how much has to be done on a support front, especially for a new platform.
Apple was the 1st and got to dictate the terms of their walled garden. The told Adobe from day 1 to get lost with flash, but for a wall it had walls amazingly low for what had been tried in the past. And people lost their minds with excitement, except those pesky open source kids.
Google looked around and said we want in but how? Get rid of the wall and let any carrier and everyone use it. All the carrier's saw they could never get to market as fast and cheap as this so they begrudgingly accepteded in the face of Iphone taking huge marketshare an growing.
MS came late with an expensive phone, a walled garden and no software(but hey kid why don't you build some for me for free).
What were they expecting?
I guarantee that they would have loved to tie your phone to an Xbox live account and make you pay 15 a month to text. That was probably the end goal and they were trying to work backwards towards it.
In just about any market, there are two to three market leaders.
- The first is the quality leader, who has the highest quality but also most expensive products. They sell low quantity but with high profit margins. (Apple)
- The second is the quantity leader, who has the lower quality but also the least expensive products. They sell with low profit margins but in high quantity. (Android)
- The last is the buy-in leader, who uses compliance or other methods of tying people to their product. It doesn't matter the quality or price point, because people are buying it for other reasons.
Traditionally, this third one was Blackberry in the mobile phone market with buy-in for enterprise. With the decline of Blackberry, it was a pretty sound strategy (at the time) to try and take that market share with Microsofts enterprise buy-in.
The problem is that Blackberry declined because the enterprise buy-in declined. Android and Apple began making it easier to access work-related functions on their platforms, and you no longer needed a separate phone to do it.
The saddest part of the story was that Nokia's amazing hardware division was lost because of this. Sure, Nokia made some classic innovator's dilemma errors, too, but they were still huge at the time Samsung got into Android (about 2x as big in phone market share). About a year or two later they decided to go with Windows Phone - the ever 2% OS of the mobile market, because it was "different".
It was stupid, and also the final fatal mistake that Nokia made. It was clear Android was well on its way to become the "Windows" of smartphones, which meant, ironically, that WP would be relegated to being at best the macOS or Linux of the mobile market. Plus, Android already allowed OEMs to be "different".
Nokia was basically making an argument for a "different ecosystem" at that point. But they should've known that it was too late to attract developers to a third ecosystem. Android had to fight hard to even reach more or less parity with the iOS ecosystem in terms of revenue for developers, even with its 5x larger market share. There was no hope WP would win in these conditions.
Nokia was too invested in Symbian, which was ill-prepared for the new world of rich smartphone experiences. As a much older platform, it had been architected around some faulty fundamental assumptions, like the phone processor only having a single core. Nokia also had an army of middle management internally which had built their careers on Symbian and would have lead an internal revolution had Nokia pivoted to Android back when it was opportune to do so.
Nokia didn't go with Windows Mobile because it thought it was the superior platform. It went with a different platform because it had become painfully clear to said middle management that Symbian could not be economically technically adapted for modern smartphone hardware, that sales were tanking as a result. And then Nokia went with Microsoft instead of Android because Microsoft gave them a boat load of money to do so, whereas with Android, Nokia would've had to build everything from scratch, and it wasn't clear anymore that they'd have the resources to do so.
Nokia's story is, more than anything else, of how technical debt can kill a company.
Eat the cost of the super phone. Make it super easy to use, develop and distribute. 5% or even flat appstore fee. Then maybe. They did it with the Xbox, but I think they got lucky with the timing on that one.
This is like them releasing an 8bit console with no games and just as expensive. In 1988, when everyone already owned a Nintendo or Sega.
This is karma for the way they started their 'Windows Smartphone' project, aka 'Stinger' (their internal name).
They partnered with UK-based Sendo, who should have been their go-to-market partner, until Microsoft nicked all the code and gave it to HTC. They, in turn, partnered with Orange to bring out the SPV. How do we know it was Sendo's code? becuase it had Sendo's bugs - the eact version could be determined by which bugs it had and didn't have.
When Microsoft starts out like this, they deserve every little failurethey get!
I wanted to develop for Windows Phone, I really did. I even bought two phones, hoping that my experience with the first one would be fixed with the second.
But I just couldn't: getting the environment to work required me to upgrade my version of Visual Studio, upgrade my version of the OS, pay a developer fee (or send an e-mail with a scan of my ID and grade transcript to get it waived as a student). And even after sorting all those obstacles, the IDE was so buggy that I couldn't even place a date picker object.
The impression I got was: you can develop for WP, as long as you do it the way we like it (OS version, Visual Studio version) and invest about a hundred dollars getting up to spec.
Compared to Android's "here's the free IDE for your OS of choice", I'm not surprised developers weren't thrilled.
But that's how development for iOS is too, probably even worse because you also need to buy the whole computer in order to develop in it (I know there are other ways, I'm just considering the way most developers do). But this model still successfully works for Apple.
Developing for Android is really amazing. But the real deal is the phone's market share. It doesn't matter much how good or crap is your experience creating apps for a specific platform. At the end of the day it's about how many users will be downloading your app. Apple and Android has the market. Windows does not have it.
This isn't surprising, really. Windows Phone has been poorly for a long time.
While I understand Microsoft's efforts at trying to approach the mobile space, it does seem that it's often at the expense of their core product - very similar to how Google nearly crippled their core offering by integrating everything with Google+.
I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks.
Every enterprise I have worked at had both linux and mac available to developers. Is this not your experience? You seem to present as truth the opposite of what I have lived.
Partner has a Chromebook, and it's really rough around the edges. 'Simple' things like file management/association is a pain. And it's been pretty buggy. Vanilla OS with no 3rd party plugins. If the OS is neglected and not matured it could easily go the same way.
They have a lot going for them in the desktop market still. Apple targets only the high end market (at least in terms of prices), Chromebooks come with a set of constraints that many can not overcome.
I worked in IT support for a while, and saw that many business apps are expected to come with a browser interface now. If companies could be weaned from their dependence on Office then Chromebooks would take off. Eliminating the support issues for Windows would be a big deal.
Performance at a low price point. I mentioned this elsewhere but when I was using a Windows phone, I'd buy $30-$50 windows phones and love them. When I eventually made the switch to a $40 Android phone is was borderline unusable so I had to pay for $300 Nexus.
I think that was the idea of Nokia. You get high end hardware with MS services.
But MS services weren’t as good years ago, and they didn’t have many apps, and they kept burning people by not letting them upgrade to a new major OS release.
There's a lot there for businesses though. If you employ a bunch of .Net developers for your in-house applications, Windows Mobile is a pretty natural way get a mobile app developed.
The problem there is that a business has employees and those employees don't want to own Windows Phones personally and at the same time businesses don't want to provide each employee a company phone either.
When MS released the first version of Windows NT it was buggy as hell. Internal to MS they ran Banyan VINES. Bill ordered it to be ripped out and replaced with NT. It was a mess. All the coders in MS quickly started to fix all the stuff that effected them. NT 3.51 came out pretty quickly after and to be honest it was quiet good for the time. For as much money as they spent trying to get people to buy the phone or write apps, they could have given a phone to each employee and family member, told them they would pay for the cell service for a year. You do not have to take it but all other phones are banded from the office. Every app you submit you get X number of RSUs. Pretty sure all the needed apps would have turned up in that year.
One cool move on Microsoft's part can be releasing Microsoft's version of Android. The main problem is Google Play Services. But since MS almost has parallel offerings for all Google Services they can create an "API" compatible version of Google Play services. This way users will be able to install all the current Android applications which are available on Play Store.
This can convert Android into an Oligopoly instead of Google's Monopoly.
> But since MS almost has parallel offerings for all Google Services they can create an "API" compatible version of Google Play service
Here's a bit of trivia: Microsoft filed an amicus brief[1] supporting Oracle's position that API's are copyrighted in Oracle v. Google.
Not long after this, coincidentally (or not) that Microsoft canceled project Astoria[2], which implemented Android APIs on Windows 10 Mobile. If they implement Google's API, and Google were to sue, it would be trivial to prove wilful infringement by citing the amicus brief (they knew it is wrong and they did it anyway).
Why would anyone bother with a copy of android when the original just works? it makes no sense.
Microsoft strategy was just bad. It tried to copy the iPhone when it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones. The only person who got something out of the Nokia deal is Elop, which is curiously similar to how bad Macromedia/Adobe deal was. What is left of both deals? nothing.
Microsoft isn't that good at consumer hardware, the only exception is the Xbox. Look at the surface book, full of issues when it should have been a hit.
Eventually MS will try a comeback in the mobile OS market, in 5/10 years, because it's essential for MS survival. But it needs to build the services to back that up.
> Microsoft strategy was just bad. It tried to copy the iPhone when it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones.
That wouldn't have worked either. Microsoft has the desktop market today because they had it in 1981 when the IBM PC was released. Operating systems have huge network effects.
There is very little they can do today that will cause them to lose that. People hate that there is no simple off switch for all the Windows 10 telemetry, but is it causing all those people to switch to Ubuntu? No. They're mostly sticking with Windows 7, and when support runs out on that, they'll grit their teeth and use Windows 10. Because they have no choice. They need Office and Photoshop and Active Directory and some weird printer thing from their weird printer support company and a dozen other things like that. Which kind of maybe have Linux equivalents but some of them aren't as good and all of them have some initial switching cost which would all have to be taken on at the same time. So when the choice comes to either let Microsoft punch you in the face or walk away, most people still aren't willing to walk away.
But with Android the shoe is on the other foot. Microsoft can't dislodge Android for the same reasons that Canonical can't dislodge Windows.
> It tried to copy the iPhone when it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones.
We tried this. Manufacturers weren’t very interested because the users weren’t. Samsung and HTC and others made windows phones and they stopped investing because they didn’t sell well enough.
The Nokia purchase was a reaction to the reality that no one else was going to build Windows phones in the future.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee (not involved in phone or OS)
I don't know that the Macromedia deal was all that bad.
While there are few, if any, surviving remnants of Macromedia software within Adobe, the acquisition of Macromedia both eliminated its most serious competitor and provided an influx of engineering talent.
Using stock price as a surrogate for overall performance, they went from ~$35 at the time of the acquisition to ~$155 today, with annual net income rising from $600M to $1.6B today.
The best combination for me is to have high quality hardware Surface Phone, just like Surface Laptop, using stock Android and high quality, stability and usability, Microsoft apps and Microsoft microservices. Two most important hardware optimizations are security and data connectivity.
> We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs. Paid money.. wrote apps 4 them.. but volume of users is too low for most companies to invest.
The problem is that no customer I knew was keen to have to pay for the same app three times. Android and iOS cost enough money. Windows Mobile only choice would be to overcome one of those two platforms quickly, but it started the race way too late. Everybody was hoping it died quickly. A market split evenly in 3 would be a budget nightmare.
However let me say that only one platform would be unhealthy. Nothing good comes from mono cultures, as IE demonstrated after winning the browser wars some 15 years ago.
Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL. I really think the device were great. However, they made the fatal mistake on this, the price point.
They priced the 950/950XL same as iPhone and Android flagship phones. Yes, I do understand the 950 and 950 XL have flagship hardware, however, you do not priced it as your phone is in high demand.
If they priced the phones at 300, it would sell a lot more. Developers do not want to develop for an OS with no users.
Not only the hardware price was bad. The fees to developer was also bad. If I recalled correctly, they also want to takes the same amount of fee as Apple and Google. If I was Microsoft, I would not charge developer any fees for 3 years just to get them on board.
> Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL.
The hardware was never the problem. Lots of great devices shipped with Windows Phone.
At some point I looked for Windows Phone device with a decent audio output so I could enjoy my lossless paid subscription to services like Tidal.
I wasn't able to select a Windows Phone. There were several models but none of it made an explicit accent on sound quality. As a last resort I looked to external DACs and it turned out that Windows Phone didn't support them either.
I just went and bought a second hand iPhone 6 with a good discount. The sound quality I got from it was decent and I became a happy Apple customer one more time (had iPhone 4 and other Apple gears before).
So a statement that the hardware was never the problem is a bit of a stretch. Everything accumulates pretty quickly and every detail has an impact.
Continuum was to be the killer feature but they shot themselves in the foot by releasing the Lumia 650 with such mediocre specs that didn't support it.
“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has argued that the company isn't out of the mobile hardware business, insisting that its HoloLens augmented reality headset is a mobile device.”
I hope the rest of the industry remains paranoid. Nadella does have a point. Mobile will evolve and in 5-10 years, watches, glasses, etc could usurp a significant share of the mobile phone market.
It can be easier to claim a new market rather than take an established one. Windows is still close to 90% of the desktop makes share, but it matters a lot less today.
This is partly why I've not put much stock into "Surface Phone" rumors, but am listening for whatever fascinating tidbits I can hear from the rumor mills of a "HoloPhone".
Back when Microsoft started started throwing in the towel and put their phones on fire sale I loaded up on $30 Lumia 640's (how could you not at that price for a 5" LTE in 2015?)
They've served me and my family well since. The lack of apps has a flip side... I'm not terrible worried about malware. ;) And I'm not worried about my kids getting too distracted by all the games, etc available on iOS/Android.
I picked up a Lumia 535 cheap mid/late 2015 and am still using it today, with W10, like a dream. I love how simple it is compared to when I see family members and they throw their phone at me wanting me to have a look at it to fix something.
I spend 2 hours yesterday morning trying to get screenshots off of my mothers Samsung galaxy something-or-other android phone and the thing is just a complete mess, photos stored in 3 separate places, some pictures in one place but not another, some available but when trying to BT to me her phone "cant fetch" the photos.. I almost had a breakdown. She also had a malware problem about half a year ago where when she turned on wifi it was uploading for hours sucking up the entire internet connection and my brother couldn't play his online games. Could not find out what was uploading or where it was uploading to but it required a complete reset. Even when working correctly she cant do tasks because she is at times bombarded with notifications from apps that fill her screen up and just seem to stress her out.
Problems like this are common with my family and mother unfortunately, she had a windows phone (back when it was Nokia making them) and never had issues apart from "lack of apps" which is why she switched when her contract allowed.
I loved WP back when I used it. It got out of my way. Its auto-complete was better than anything I'd used before or since (though a friend has it, and he says this has degraded over time?) Anyway, I use Android now because of Republic Wireless. It is a real shame that Android took off instead of WP.
This doesn't mean anything, to me. I just read "Windows 10 Mobile as a standalone OS is going away." Remember that Windows OneCore is a thing, and that Windows on Arm is a thing. They are eliminating all the "one-off" operating systems and consolidating all of the features into OneCore.
I am not pining for Windows Mobile (despite owning several throughout the past decade) I just think that Windows OneCore will make Windows available on phones again if Microsoft ever have a good reason to enter the mobile market again.
UWP apps that work by accident on phones is not a bad strategy, though. Good application design is responsive, same reason responsive became a huge buzzword in web dev. Even if you are just designing with Desktop in mind: there are hundreds of combinations of monitor resolutions and DPI settings, and everyone has their own personal preferences for how they arrange applications on those monitors. Windows apps have always been resizable and there are always people that will want to shrink app windows to tiny phone sizes while they work on other things.
While WM was clunky at least you could run any random piece of software you wanted. Then Microsoft tried to copy apple. I think if they had put a relatively open OS and sold highend phones for $200-300 bucks I think they could have made it. They probably would have had to sink billions and billions, but they could have done it. Look at Xbox its viable platform today.
You can sideload applications in Windows 10 mobile easily enough. Like Android it's been on by default for some time and just a matter of downloading an .appx package file. The ability to sideload doesn't help if there aren't apps to sideload.
I don't think the problem was ever the openness of the platform. An open platform doesn't guarantee developers either (look at decades of people not support Linux ports of their applications as an obvious example).
The problem with sideloading is that it requires a lot of hops. So many hops nobody does this.
Usually "a hop" is represented by some required certificate, a special "container" the app needs to follow, a special API voodoo call you should make to sideload the app. It quickly decays from being a reliable reproducible computer science, and turns into the joke of marketing greed you would never trust.
Look I don't want to beat a dead horse, but Microsoft has no one else to blame but themselves. The launch version was a great early adopter MVP and moved the entire mobile industry to a content first paradigm (flat UI). However, they never tried to catch up in the feature department. Instead they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.
So during all of those years, developers were left with those same C# MVP APIs that didn't support all the various things 3rd party companies needed. It required hiring a specialist C# engineer and spending extra time to fill in the gaps left behind. No company was going to do that with a phone barely at 10% of the market.
Microsoft should have ruthlessly focused on getting feature parity with iPhone and Android, and released updates every month. Showed the world they were serious about being a 1st-tier dominant player.
Instead, they felt lazy and slow. I think there was 18 months between one release to the next without a peep from them. That's no way to instill confidence that they were competent at their job.
> they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.
I think it’s easy for us to focus on software but I don’t think any of that mattered compared to failing so badly on the hardware side. Over that period, how many weeks were there where they had phone hardware which was competitive with Android, much less iOS? It seemed like every time I saw it mentioned the cycle was “<software feature> looks cool but the phone specs are like my old phone”.
That was one of the little gems of Windows Phone. It could do what your current generation Android/Apple phone could do on previous generation hardware.
I remember when they tried to push the first version of Windows Phone out of the gates. I think it was 2008 or 2009. Then - as to be expected with that ambitious projects - they already had big delays.
What happened then is a good example of how big companies seem to have problems taking the necessary radical steps when projects don't perform. I've experienced this at my employee. Only that the project I have in mind is more than 10 years heavily underperforming while spending easily over a billion dollars. Microsoft seemed to let the Windows Phone project keep going pretty much the same way as it started ... same project lead, probably a lot of the same people. What happens than typically is that good people don't work on this kind of projects.
Then the whole Nokia mess ... what a sad story.
I remember when I finally gave up any hope for Windows Phone: It was when I read that Samsung and HTC ought to pay license fee to Microsoft. That was probably the biggest mistake in Microsoft's history. They should have payed them 50 $ per sold Smartphone with Windows Phone on it.
Anyway - I still have a Windows Phone from my employee and like it.
As much as I loved Windows Phone (I bought 4 of them), the app development side was never mature enough to take seriously by most professionals. The support from Microsoft on the development side was pretty limited, outside of "hey, we're MS, you need to do this!"
At the time, the Metro theme seemed like a novel and interesting idea. In hindsight, mimicking the UX of iOS (which is exactly what Android did), was the correct path. Had MS made the Windows Phone look exactly like iOS, but offered an easier app dev story, there _might_ have been a chance to grow their market share.
But in reality, I doubt there is anything MS could have done to rebuild their mobile presence. Apple and Android are an unassailable juggernaut from a consumer's perspective and even I succumbed.
After buying the Nokia 1020, which was a phenomenal piece of hardware, MS started tinkering with core apps like the calendar and email. There was this fanfare of purchasing third party apps and adapting them, but this was the deal-breaker for me. These two apps (which I installed with an early beta of Windows 10 Mobile) were simply horrible. They were menu oriented. Mobile phone apps shouldn't have menus. Period. Anytime you see a hamburger menu, you're looking at pure UX laziness. When the second update came through and I saw these apps get _worse_....
...I walked out of work, walked the two blocks to the nearest AT&T store, threw the 1020 on the little round table and said, "iPhone 6plus, don't care about color or anything....and I rubber case"...
That was nearly three years ago. I recently upgraded to the 7plus and sold my 6plus for $250. I never even think about apps now. It just works.
My black Nokia 1020 with the recharging case sits in my desk. Worthless.
Well worthless is subjective. There's some value since the camera is pretty great and it can still be used as a legit phone. And I keep tabs on if anyone has built some 3rd party tools for it to turn it into something cool.
This. But wait, in order to further harmonize "cloud first mobile first experiences" they may be deeply pleased to announce one more important transition from UWP to OneCore.
UWP is getting new features all the time, it's the way forward for Windows apps and will stay for many years to come. Even all the default Windows 10 apps and stuff like settings UI are UWP.
OneCore is an internal Windows refactor that won't affect users nor developers.
What Microsoft did wrong: charge for the OS, and then rewrite it.
I had a Samsung Omnia 7, and it was still the best phone I've had, in the sense that the UI was fast, obvious, and well thought out.
Then they brought out Windows 8 mobile. And abandoned all hardware that ran Windows 7 mobile. And messed around with a working UI and broke the 'experience' (ghastly buzzword).
And all the while, trying to fight Android which was free, and Apple that just has a cult of users that will buy the new phone regardless.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, I have worked for Microsoft before and quit, and come back. I love the company, but I am no zealot (tried to standardize a company on Macs during my six years away, because it made sense). I never worked on Windows Phone, but I know the company and the tech well.
Here is where we fucked up:
1. We were, for a long time, a company, where every product/business group had to pay for its own right to exist. Everyone had their own P&L, contribution margin targets, marketing. You had to make money by yourself to stay alive. KT made sure we all understood this.
2. We had a history of "fast follower" successes - Windows, Word, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, IE, even Intune nowadays, and many many others got successful not by disrupting the current market leader or by hardcore innovation, but by leveraging either an open or standard platform and always getting better, without trying to rewrite the rules of the game. OK, maybe Office rewrote them when it came out, but it was packaging.
3. Balmer (whom I love as a leader) got trolled by Apple's and Google's success, and Microsoft graduating from not really cool to quite uncool. So he decided to tackle them the way it had worked before (point 2.). Simultaneously, he tried to correct point 1, but, as radical as his 2014 reorganization to break org barriers was, he did not get rid of KT (Kevin Turner). KT brought in the money, KT defined the culture. Everyone had to keep making their own money.
We could have:
Offered the mobile OS for free from day one.
Given Office on Mobile for free from day one.
Bought or OEMed Xamarin a lot sooner.
Returned 100% of app revenue to app devs who sell through the Windows Store.
Made dev tools (Studio CE) free earlier.
Guaranteed no data collection (remember the Scroogled campaign…?)
All those have either been done, or are irrelevant now, while the stock is still at a record high, after we lost the game... We could have done all of the above and fare better than we have, and we have fared well.
Instead, we comp hardware sellers on MARGIN, as if it makes a bloody difference. We monetize the post install experience. All bullshit for pennies. Everyone had to make money on their own so we missed the bigger picture.
Satya fixed this, and it hurt, as it was the only way left to go. I gave up on a phone I really liked, as I saw no future.
I don't know if I should hope for us bringing new phones out, but I sure hope we never again let our Operating Mechanisms kill our ability to see the big picture and disrupt the market.
> We could have: Offered the mobile OS for free from day one. Given Office on Mobile for free from day one. Bought or OEMed Xamarin a lot sooner. [...] Made dev tools (Studio CE) free earlier.
Quoted for emphasis. It's remarkable in hindsight that Microsoft didn't try to leverage it's own already successful products with their inherent network effects, to buy market-share.
I'm more interested in: what's the future for UWP apps now? Another dead end like silverlight?
A cross platform UI library that runs on .Net core (ie. windows, mac, linux, android, ios), some kind of hybrid of ??? and Xamarin forms could potentially be quite a nice tool... but its pretty hard to be excited about the prospect with their track record of killed off UI frameworks so far.
UWP apps wouldn't be so bad for Windows if maybe Microsoft extended their functionality a little and kept improving their performance.
However, what scares me to death as a user is that if UWP is let's say super-popular with developers 5-10 years from now, and everyone builds their apps as UWP apps for Windows, then Microsoft will eventually restrict "normal" users (read: most "consumer" Windows machines) from even side-loading apps from outside of the store.
If that's something that has even crossed the minds of Microsoft's leadership, then I definitely don't want UWP to gain any sort of real traction. And I'd rather see Microsoft improve user security through instant virtualization for apps, like what they're doing with App Guard for Edge, even if it's only an option users could choose, and not something that works by default for most or all apps.
Exactly that was the original intent with Metro apps. For developers, Visual Studio was able to provision keys (online), but otherwise you had to be inside AD domain, or have the Enterprise SKU and "sideloading key".
Only with Windows 10 it became possible to sideload non-win32 apps.
I guess that will depend on Widnows Store, if that is working, even a little, I would guess UWP is safe. The fall creator's update has some nice new features -including SQL and acrylic - it will be interesting to watch adoption rates over the next year
The existence of Windows Phone was one of the more confusing efforts in the professional world. Microsoft had released an OS that, while itself was a capable OS, the ecosystem around it was unacceptable. The availability of apps was terrible, and those that were there were often not kept up to the standard that iOS and Android apps were.
Still, a lot of people bought them at work because of concerns over compatibility with Exchange or the rest of their Microsoft ecosystem. They've all slowly had to learn that Microsoft isn't as omnipresent as it once was, and have had to buy new devices and learn a new OS all over again.
Microsoft really should have killed this sooner and saved everyone the headache.
Sad news. I have a Nokia Windows 8.1 phone. Battery life is excellent for a smart phone. Build quality is great including quality of camera. Apps are the only missing feature. Sad all the expertise Nokia built up over the years has come to nought.
I'm also still using my Lumia 925 as my main phone. And despite this news I'm still thinking about buying a newer one, second hand. Every time I use android or IOS I miss tiles, pinning, the super clean settings
I was using WP since times of WP 7 and Lumia 710. At that time other options were either super costly iPhone or crappy lagging Android. WP had a fresh look, smooth OS and range of hardware from Nokia.
Unfortunately, MS fumbled couple of times with internals while moving to WP 8 and WM 10.
In the meanwhile Android fixed the kinks and improved UI. Motorola and Xiaomi improved value for money of Android.
You may think it ran as smoothly, but it certainly didn't do as much.
Lumia 520 and Moto G were almost identical hardware (almost same CPU, same GPU, Moto G had double RAM and 720p display, Lumia only 800x480), for similar price, but the Moto G was way better device, that did stuff people wanted.
Pretty sure we talk about the same time nexus 3 and 4 were a thing. In that case Android was far from Laggy already. Hardware producers just still fucked everything in their software up
They've given up on being a mobile OS provider, I think, at least for now. I wonder if the announcement that they got the Win 10 kernel to compile on ARM is more geared at laptops/tablets than phones.
What I haven't seen reported is Win 6.X had a large enterprise/industrial user base that now is going to have to choose between Android and iOS. It's interesting that the size of that existing customer base is small enough, compared to the consumer market, that it's not worth Microsoft's efforts to keep the industrial mobile OS product going.
"incentivize app devs". as an early adopter I felt abandoned.
I was all in on windows mobile around v7 and windows8. bought the flagship lumia phone and surface rt tablet. invested the time to develop some basic apps. 6 months later both platforms were basically discontinued with no upgrade path, so I abandoned it too.
if microsoft had just made an enterprise successor to blackberry, instead of trying to make a consumer phone, they probably would have been more successful. once the platform had traction in enterprise, maybe they could of made the consumer jump.
Sorry you feel abandoned. However, as you say you are an early adopter you should recognize this is a strong (even likely?) possibility.
Yes, if the platform you invest in early is a success you can reap many rewards. But the mobile OS market has killed many platforms, and even a successful company like Microsoft can't guarantee success.
We can play what-ifs in hindsight, but it's not like Microsoft was late to the game. I remember Windows CE and Pocket PC. My guess (and hope) is for Microsoft to make an Android phone. They just announced a launcher, so fingers crossed!
MS really doesn't understand why people don't like their products. And that's a bit bonkers. People get paid lots of money to think about that problem everyday, and they still can't figure it out.
Nobody trusts you. They don't trust your vision. They don't trust your commitment. They don't trust your ability. They don't trust your execution. And they don't trust your intentions.
no one trusts Microsoft. Well maybe some people do, but how's that working out for you?
Where does this leave Windows Universal Development? Hardly Universal if it’s only for Windows 10 desktop. I’m no Windows nor Xbox user, but do people develop using Universal for both? Are there other platforms right now worth targeting for Windows Universal?
There's still HoloLens, Surface Hub, XBox, and IoT Core and Enterprise.
My employer writes UWP apps for itself, because we have all of these devices (even XBox) and write UWP apps for them all (because with the exception of IoT Enterprise, they're all UWP-only.)
IoT Mobile is still a SKU that Microsoft sell, by the way. Guess what IoT Mobile is? It's Windows Mobile.
It isn't dead, it's just not getting new features. It'll be replaced by OneCore in the not too distant future, I imagine.
UWP is getting new features all the time, it's the way forward for Windows apps and will stay for many years to come. Even all the default Windows 10 apps and stuff like settings UI are UWP.
OneCore is an internal Windows refactor that won't affect users nor developers.
I think a big question now is will Microsoft build a smartphone product on top of Android? This will help them capture existing app ecosystem and enable them to provide "the best of Microsoft" for enterprise mobile customers. The cloud market is so important and it just seems strategically weak to not have a phone platform to connect with that. Google Cloud has Google Play Services and there is lots of opportunity there.
What Google has done with iOS and even Android (particularly with Samsung's play to break dependency on Google) might be where MS is heading. Google has decoupled their apps/services from the OS, and provided a consistent 'Google-y' UX (or working towards that anyway) across all of the platforms. MS seems to be in the way there, with Edge being released for both mobile platforms.
This makes me really sad given Windows 10 Mobile had a desktop mode, Continuum, and Microsoft had x86-on-ARM emulation in development for Windows 10 laptops.
I actually really like windows 10 mobile, but as a developer my attention span is limited and the market just wasn't there.
That said, I think if they announced convergence on all devices, released some really nice hardware (surface phone anybody?), and marketed convergence as the Next Big Thing, they could have made some serious in-roads in market share.
Windows Phone had potential. All MS needed to do was to show some real commitment to it by keeping APIs relatively stable and not impose any onerous requirements.
APIs were never stable for very long and all the weird UI decisions they tried to force down peoples throats really backfired. The marketing hype around universal apps backfired too - the developer APIs were not at all aligned with the marketing vision.
Truthfully, I think Microsoft is adjusting to being a corporation without a monopoly. That's what it comes down to - away from the desktop users had more attractive options (iOS/Android) and even on the desktop users just avoided upgrading (I skipped both Vista and Windows 8) while others have totally ditched desktops altogether.
Those are like the poster children of tech industry network effects. Apple was first, Google decoupled the OS from the hardware, and Windows came in two years after Google without the goodwill Google has. Amazon and Facebook are the same story. Too late, not hip enough to catch on with the cool kids.
Both Amazon's and Facebook's attempts were modifications atop Android. You could throw Samsung's skinned Android into the same comparison and call it a success.
It's a shame but it's not surprising. I loved my Lumia Icon way back, but even then the lack of apps from all but the biggest players was eventually a dealbreaker. I went to iPhone personally, I like the similar build quality and the heft to the devices is nice.
Honestly I'll never understand why MS even went into the mobile space, what with having two enormous and well entrenched competitors (not that I'm saying only having two is a good thing overall, but you know) and coming into the game so very, very late compared to them. Windows Phone was doomed from the start I think, just by market forces, not even going into the faults with the product itself.
Does anyone actually make money on the app Store? Either Desktop or Mobile?
I have a niche desktop app that I'm thinking about porting. It's probably a few weeks worth of work. The 30% cut might be tolerable if I can increase the sales.
I still remember one of the first HTC phones which had a mobile version of I think windows xp. The phone came with a stylus and the windows felt like a miniaturized version of desktop. This improved significantly in the Lumia series, the UI was good and easy to use. But by then the app ecosystem had already built strongly around android and ios so there was not much traction. I feel microsoft lost the ecosystem battle rather than OS. With too big app stores, the developers did not have much appetite for supporting another ecosystem which was very small.
After my dad had a stroke, he needed a new phone that he could use easily. We ended up with a Nokia using Windows Phone because the large tiles and keyboard buttons were something he could handle. The iOS and Android interfaces required more precision than he was able to do.
To be fair, this was 5 or so years ago and I didn't delve very far into accessibility settings for anything. WP worked fine out of the box, though.
It should also be noted that W10 Mobile was a slow running, bug ridden mess when it was released and took well over a year to become usable.
It was also not compatible with most of the existing Windows Phone handsets in use, and at the same time, Microsoft killed off their phone hardware (nothing released since 2015) and pulled them out of stores. So anywhere that Windows phones were gaining traction in were guaranteed to be short lived.
It was already too late that MS embrace opensource and made their IDE(Visual Studio) for free. Developers who can't afford it already moved on and used free and opensource alternatives and then start to love it without looking back at MS stuff. They then realize that MS technologies are not the only cool tools and programming languages to write applications with and make money.
Joe Belfiore wholly missed the problem. Microsoft didn't need apps. Most people using Windows Mobile had enough apps. But the last Verizon phone which could run Windows came out three years ago. People left Windows because they didn't have any options. Had Microsoft kept Nokia intact, even in a reduced size state, Windows Mobile would probably still have it's 5% or so market share.
I could have told them almost a decade ago that the whole Microsoft mobile/phone thing was doomed from the very start. It's amazing to me that it was so obvious to me then, and yet the smartest highest-paid people at Microsoft couldn't figure it out. Unbelievable.
The webview in Windows Phone was I think Internet Explorer 10 or something like that. Thus we were unable to port our Sencha Touch 1.1.1 app to Windows Phone.
Then we have tried to rewrite the app with Sencha Touch 2 but because it was time consuming my employer told me to work on other things.
If you supported Edge or IE for Windows 10 Desktop then it would of supported the mobile version since both use the same platform. So you are still going to have to support this OS if you are targeting Windows for desktop and tablets.
Not something I'll regret about. I'm looking forward to Librem 5 running Plasma Mobile with native Wayland and baseband separated from the CPU (they've just succeeded in crowdfunding).
It's a shame, I had a win7 device and it had some great ideas, they had the groundwork laid for a solid platform... But from what I've heard, it didn't get better as it progressed.
It has been a slow death for Windows Mobile. To think that my very first smartphone was an HP Windows phone way before we even imagined that there will be something called Android.
If Microsoft can't make things happen, I am not sure who can ! They have money, influence, power and user base with personal computers and cloud, and still they failed !
I used a Nokia Lumia with Windows Phone 8. People say that the UI was better than Android or iOS, but I disagree.
The flat UI of Windows Phone was completely unintuitive. In the real world it's many times easy to distinguish objects you can interact with, by shape, texture or touch. With feature phones or remote controls you had hardware buttons.
With PC monitors and touch screens all controls are virtual, you get no 3D or touch feedback, so you have to rely on visual clues and visual patterns.
The flat UI of Windows Phone was pretty bad, providing no visual clues whatsoever, so you where left to touch text randomly on the screen, in the hope that some of it will click.
I see people here giving examples of technically illiterate wives and grandparents successfully using the Windows Phone, but guys, you're kind of missing the forest from the trees.
It's not that hard to learn how to make a phone call, or write an SMS, given that it's an operation that you're doing every couple of hours. You simply have to learn the path from home screen to whatever you want to do. Ask any child and he'll tell you that this is best done by trial and error and it is never a problem for repetitive operations, because we've got good memories.
The problems happens when you interact with an application UI that you've never seen before. And to be honest, even though I've been primarily an iOS user for the past 3 years, the best of the bunch in this regard is Android.
By comparison Android's material design provides intelligent clues about what can be pressed, or about what interaction just happened. And the design of Android applications is pretty flat, in the sense that available options are clearly laid out in front of you, no need to guess or to trigger hidden menus.
My favorite example was RunKeeper for iOS versus Android. The Android version had clear action buttons for starting a race, allowing me to easily select the type, whereas the iOS interface had the options hidden behind a menu that would appear when I tapped on the logo, which was a pretty dumb idea. I'm not even going to mention the dedicated Back button of Android, because people that don't have an Android just don't get it.
But back to Windows Phone, I don't know what you folks have been smoking, but it had terrible UI. And the apps where horrible. Its only saving grace where those Nokia Lumia phones that had a good quality/price ratio, but Android was already dominating the cheap smartphone market and a cheap Android might have been worse, but at least it had apps.
The weird thing is that Win Phone 8 (ish) was pretty nice with great animations, and nice fit and finish, then they seemed to throw all that away in later versions.
Android released couple of months after the iPhone. Windows Phone couple of years later. This is it. Microsoft could have easily been the leading mobile platform.
Microsoft was the leading mobile platform. They even had apps, real apps, desktop-caliber (for the time) apps. 10 years before the iPhone.
Microsoft had the lead for a while and they got disrupted by a shinier, more consumer-friendly device. Their mistake was thinking that consumers didn't want a smartphone and aiming it at an enterprise market, like Blackberry. That "mistake" made them possibly billions of dollars over its life.
Apple took a huge risk going in the opposite direction. It's easy to look back and realize Microsoft gave up a huge market segment, but at the time things were going well for them. Their only competitor back then (Palm) bet the company on trying to make the transition to compete with Apple and... well. We all know what happened there.
if I was Microsoft's CEO, I would have donated $ billions to Mozilla. Then let Mozilla to build the best mobile browser. The Web can easily abstract the OS. As WeChat has shown. That way I can sell more handsets and also bespoke "Microsoft Services" based on the web.
so that you cut into your competitors cash cows, even if you don't have a profit. Just like Google did to you with Google Docs, cutting into MS Office.
This way, you'd at least have a voice on mobile, instead of fully out.
With the right strategy, making money is not essential. Like Google with the Nexus a few years ago, MS needs only to build reference hardware to keep OEMs on the straight and narrow, then collect elsewhere (with preinstalled services or OS that OEMs end up distributing).
The problem is that "elsewhere" is currently occupied by Google (in terms of ubiquity) and Apple (in terms of profit), so MS has been pushed into the uncomfortable role of luxury OEM, and there is no major money there regardless of whether you make phones or laptops.
Not sure if Microsoft has earned back it's investment on the Surface line yet. First years it was a big loss, then it has started to earn money, but it has started falling again.
Compared to Xbox, Surface revenue is about a 25% of Xbox.
In 2009, when announcing Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft launched the Windows Marketplace, a tentative to catch up with the App Store Gold rush. We were a french Windows Mobile game company back then, so we decided to submit our games to the Windows Marketplace. The process was really not smooth, on the technical side, on the "marketing" side and the process side.
On the technical side, the apps submission was crippled with bugs, with cryptic messages that we couldn't figure. A lot of developers were having the same troubles and we painfully figured out what were the problems while searching Microsoft forums. It gave me a really bad impression, and I remembered not being impressed at all. We were also in the process of submitting our first app to the iOS App Store and comparing the two experiences was not good for Microsoft, even with the complexity of certificates/signatures of the App Store.
On the marketing side, the entry price for submitting 5 apps to the Marketplace was $99. Then, you had to pay $10 for each new app, or for a new localised version of your app (you had to create a new entry for each localised version). Once again, on the iOS store, you just had to pay $99/year for a developper certificate and then you could submit any number of apps/version you want. I didn't understand back then why Microsoft had chosen theses rules: they just had to copy a successful model from their competitor. We did what almost all developers did at this time : we paid $99, submitted 5 apps and waited to see how successful was the Marketplace.
Our game, a puzzle game called Meon, began to be downloaded a lot. We saw purchases going up in the Marketplace vendor interface. We were super happy, but there was a problem. We couldn't figure how to fill the paiement account. All instructions seemed to be written for a US developper : you had to provide a proof of identity signed by a notary, you had to fill a W8-BEN form etc... We kept trying to submit our W8-BEN form but kept receiving email about our W8-BEN that told-us something was bad with it. For 6 months, we couldn't fill our paiement information, while we saw the royalties climbed up. At the same time, Microsoft launched the "Race to Market Challenge" to boost the Marketplace and motivate developer to submit apps. Ironically, we won the race in the 'Most Downloaded Free Application' (and accessory a really really big Microsoft Surface Table). As winner, we were invited in August in Seattle, among other developers, to attend to a private presentation of what will be the next Microsoft platform, Windows Phone 7. It was really cool from Microsoft to invite us, a small game company (3 persons) among big name like Bank of America. In the Microsoft office, I managed to explain our payment problem to one of the presenter, he sent a mail and few days later, our payment information was validated and we finally got our money.
What I learned then was to not trust Microsoft when you’re a small developer : if I hadn't been able to contact a Microsoft manager in person, I wouldn't be able to get my money. The whole process was not ready, and not in the same league of the growing App Store. As a 3 developers company, we prioritised to work on iOS and Android. Microsoft sent us Lumia phone to develop apps for Windows 7: It was too late, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
definitely helped. MS put a lot of effort into building a slick YouTube app and Google changed the T&Cs the week after it launched or something. Basically issued a takedown of the MS app because it didn't conform to the new standard they'd just introduced. I believe it was that third party apps had to allow ads, even though the iOS and Android apps did not.
Naw, you have it all wrong. They reversed engineered the YouTube API's and then suppressed YouTube ads. They deserved what they got for doing something that stupid and not thinking Google wouldn't find out.
MS has gotten really good with hardware off late. Why not a Surface phone with Stock android and regular updates? If it works out, gives MS a platform to try different services like Samsung with bixby etc.
I wonder what that guy has done to get and keep such an elite tech job, complete with year-long vacations, and doesn't even have to 'pretend' to use his own products.
If you supported Edge or IE for Windows 10 Desktop then it would of supported the mobile version since both use the same platform. So you are still going to have to support this OS if you are targeting Windows for desktop and tablets.
Well Windows phone was just different. And being different does not always mean being the best. Windows on mobile should have been more modular when it came to looks. Enforcing tiles on mobile when people were used to traditional icons on screen was a terrible decision. I am not going to write about the other issues like incompatibilities , lack of apps and other chicken and egg problems.
You can experiment when you have the user base and even then you need to be super careful.
I was working in Microsoft about 5 years ago and Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time. For keystone apps they tried to partner with developers doing most of the work for them. For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.
Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.
I worked 3 years as a windows phone dev and i'm sorry to say but Microsofts efforts were ... almost insultingly bad.
It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported and adding corporate design to it was hard as it was too different. Silverlight and XAML was okay for the time.
Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it.
Then windows 10 came and it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved. The Live-Tiles got even worse since you couldn't programm them like the windows 8 ones. Just a whole mess. Couple that with the hillariously bad store interface (backend aswell as frontend) and 0 User engagement and it was bound to fail (as will all UWP apps)
You guys build a, I'm sorry to say but after 3 years of frustration it's fair to say, half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android, restricted the developers unecessarily, broke compatibility once a year requiring a complete rewrite and frankly build a product that only microsoft liked but was universally hated by their users.
It's a story of too little too late and a whole lot of arrogance on microsofts side.
Oh and don't even get me started on microsoft completely ignoring the european market where they actually got up to 15% marketshare of new devices sold for a while.
The thing about the MS platforms that has always been an issue is that they change the developer APIs around all the time. Every year they come out with the latest greatest way to access a database or whatever and it really isn't that much better than what they had last year, but it still requires a rewrite.
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There's a semi-contradiction in your post that I think speaks to some of the issues MS had:
"It started with windows phone 8 and the Metro UI. Bad Idea. The UI was too far away from Android/iPhone to be easily ported "
"half-baked half-assed phone plattform that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android"
As someone who played around with WP7 when it first came out, I'd argue that the Metro UI was the best one available at the time. But the side effect of that is that it was different, and difficult to adapt an existing app to.
Essentially, MS needed to make a bold new platform with inventive new features, but also make the platform very compatible with the other major mobile platforms. You can't easily square that circle. Now, MS also messed up in a million and one ways (like my phone never getting a WP8 upgrade...) but I think their fundamental challenge was very, very difficult.
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> that at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android
According to the dates[0] I found online says Windows was the first to have a feature that would automatically connect to your cellular connection if the Wifi didn't work. Most consumers don't care but it is something I was surprised iPhones[1] and Android[2] didn't have at least at the time. In addition continuum is unique/better in many ways although that is more recent. It has been a while since I have used a Windows Phone.
[0] Windows 8.1 definitely had it in 2014 according to this https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/10652/windows-phone... I'm pretty sure Windows Phones predating this also had it although documentation seems lacking.
[1] Wi-fi assist was introduced in iOS 9(2015). https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205296
[2] There are apps for Android that do this but at least this one is 3rd party. No sources says it predates 2015. I have not experimented with this on Android. https://www.guidingtech.com/54831/get-ios-like-wi-fi-assist-...
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I had the same experience while working on WP in 2012-13.
In early 2013, I reported a bug when some of the elements inside LongListSelector would disappear randomly on scrolling. LongListSelector is WP’s counterpart for iOS’s tableView.
So I started a discussion on Microsoft forums on this bug. Someone from Microsoft confirmed this bug.
I tracked this bug for 9 months. And guess what they never fixed it. They never fixed a critical bug in the most used UI component of mobile apps.
> it finally looked like the UWP Plattform might do the trick. Well nope. The SDK is garbage. Scaling from phone to desktop is hidiously bad and afaik still not solved.
A lot people tell me Xcode is garbage, Eclipse is a nightmare, but these apps keep getting cranked out. The Android / iOS language and platform api's are SNAFU, but people get still get into the IDE and start making, without any promise for a set of conversion-frameworks + XML files that will make the app for All The Things. At the rate an app builder is adding features, the universal-platform paradigm is cognitive overload.
I think a No-XML based approach to app development, similiar to VB6 / VBA, would have been greatly appreciated. If MS gives me a stable API to an email client, a calendar, a shared drive, and a messaging or video chat service, I'd spend the 5 hours to automate a 5 minute inconveneince. A windows phone with a bunch of "lifehacks" apps would tremendously useful to much of the smartphone market, as long as they had the cant-live-without-apps too.
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> Then came windows 8.1 and windows desktop 8 which was universally hated. The whole fullscreen apps debacle was just horrible and all the unnecessary restrictions on store apps for desktop made no one ever consider porting their desktop app to a store app. The whole phone and desktop app in one was a joke aswell since it was (and still is!) horrible implemented. Did I mention they broke compatibility from 8.1 to phone 8? I didn't even bother starting all over again for windows 8.1 i just straight up skipped it.
What was so horrible about it? I almost invested in a surface just off the strength of the UI; I rather liked that they were trying to merge desktop and tablet. Why was the experience so bad?
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The biggest frustration, to me, is that WPF was basically left on the vine while they pursued this WinRT stuff.
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Good to hear from someone who was valiantly trying to create apps for this platform. I always wondered why developers never flocked to the MS platform since it always seemed wide open with not a lot of competition compared to the IOS and Android platforms.
Thanks for laying bare why it failed so badly.
This reminds me of a Timer app I downloaded when I had a HD8 that didn’t actually alert you when your time was up because of the way the native Alarm SDK was written (something to do with being unable to dispatch an alarm notification at exactly a given time). It made things...difficult.
> at no point had even a single feature that wasn't available better on iOS and Android
Not only is this untrue for years past, it's still untrue (See Continuum + UWP)
This is a stretch IMO. I was working there too at the time and the focus on apps was never as strong as it should have been. Yes, they paid out lots of money to get devs to build apps, but they never really dedicated the resources to building quality apps. The prime example was Facebook. This was an app built by Microsoft with FBs blessing, but it was always far behind in terms of features and quality. Developement of that app and other flagship apps was not a core focus. Work was outsourced and not given enough resources. Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved. From my prospective the focus was on filling the store with apps regardless of quality. This convinced the first generation of Microsoft loyalists to buy Windows Phones, but turned off many of those people. Most would not go on to buy a second WP or recommend them to friends and family. This includes many (dare I say most) Microsoft employees who where enthusiastic about the product at first, but when it came time to buy a second or third device moved on to Android or iPhone.
I was going to chime in a little on it being a stretch. One of the promotions for students they did was near the summer of 2012 or 2013. The promotion was you got paid 100 dollars for every app published on the Microsoft store limit 5 for the mobile store and 5 for the regular store. So a total limit of $1000. My school actually had a Microsoft rep run a workshop over a weekend showing students how to publish an app on the store. He gave us a template for a number of apps to "test" with. I made about $300 that weekend by publishing 3 different variants of a wackamole game. The workshop I attended had about 25 students total and we all left publishing at least one app. Idk how wide spread this outreach was. I checked on my apps sometime last year and they were all still up. I ended up pulling them out of a mix of shame and embarrassment.
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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.
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The problem with WP was that it was late and offered nothing very special to consumers over android/iOS (and ya, I loved my 920). Consumers had no reason to buy it, developers had no reason to dev for it, a huge vicious circle that would have been difficult to break under the best of circumstances. The war was lost when the WinMo 7 team decided to after Blackberry in 2007, ignoring the iPhone as consequential, requiring that dev/design reset later that was just too late.
Man the more comments I read the more I begin to remember. There was ONE dev who was churning out VERY high quality apps to popular platforms. I think Snapchat or Instagram was what he got known for. Instead of MS embracing his work and helping it flourish, they let him get taken down by a C&D.
LOTS of people got heated when that happened.
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>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved.
For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?
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Intead they staffed their quality dev team on the Windows Mail app and Skype...
The problem with windows phone / mobile is not the apps. It was Microsoft.
When Apple launches an Phone, it’s avaliable world wide. When Microsoft launches a phone, it’s avaliable in America.
My last windows phone was a Lumia 925, the last Lumia announced I waited 7 months for it to reach singapore before throwing in the towel and going android.
There were no phones avaliable outside America, uk, Australia.
Now I use iPhone. I have no sympathy for Microsoft in regards to it’s phone biz because it didn’t try to break the market.
You don't know how untrue this is, couple of things. First lets start with this qoute
"According to Kantar's October 2013 report, Windows Phone accounted for 10.2% of all smartphone sales in Europe and 4.8% of all sales in the United States."
and then this one
"Microsoft announced new data from IDC indicating that Windows Phone is the second-most-used mobile platform in Latin America."
Lastly, do you not remember the launch of the iPhone? Not only was it only available in the US, you could only get it on AT&T.
There can be many reasons Windows Phone failed, but what you've mentioned isn't one of them.
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Didn't the iPhone launch US-only?
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This. I knew everyone from seniors, the a police chief, to tech folks carrying Windows phones. The apps we needed were there. But Microsoft had a nearly-useless approach to hardware releases, they constantly missed the boat.
I currently carry the last Windows Mobile phone on Verizon (the US' largest carrier). It is from 2014. (Actually, a new Elite x3 is coming out next week, three years later.) This is ridiculous. When the Elite x3 originally came out, we wondered what insanity was someone releasing a phone "for enterprise" that didn't work on Verizon, the main carrier of enterprise users.
We didn't need apps, we needed phones.
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They threw about $500k at my employer at the time to hire some Eastern European company to build an app. They ended up stringing something together that got deployed on like 10 phones.
The problem was that a big enterprise customer is clueless about mobile apps, and Microsft’s endemic NIH syndrome made it difficult to work with business systems that aren’t Microsoft platforms.
O365 is a great example... the office platform should be an amazing mobile platform that drives all sorts of interesting things. But as an O365 customer, Microsoft just uses it as a lever to push their MDM product (you cannot configure Office apps without Microsoft stuff).
MDM is a pure commodity play. Microsoft would rather made $4.99 month on Intune than capture business process on their platform, which is worth 10x more.
Meanwhile Apple treats everyone pretty equally, and you can actually get stuff done.
I said this 20 years ago and it is still true today... Microsoft should spin off Office, server and client into different companies. Office could be an exponentially more valuable cash cow without being dragged down by the shitshow of Windows. Windows on client is a legacy product providing solutions to problems that people don’t have. Office is fundamentaly a more valuable platform.
Where I work, PC users spend more time in Outlook any other application. Browser and Word account for about 50% and 25% less time on average. So why are we presenting this UI optimized for computing circa 1997 where people run lots of little apps? Apple got this right by making iOS very low touch.
I'm not sure what your beef with Windows as a client OS is but if you're saying that the UI should be dumbed down, remember how the attempt to do so with Win8 backfired and that Microsoft quickly reverted most of those changes in Win8.1.
As the older generation is dying off / retiring, the percentage of people who have been using a computer for a long time has increased immensely, the "secretary who can't figure out copy/paste" issue is becoming less relevant every day. These days the only people I need to help do basic tasks in Windows are my retired parents.
I don't see how an iOS-like UI would be an improvement for virtually anything I can imagine doing on a Windows PC.
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Outlook+Exchange is really the thing keeping Microsoft alive.
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Having done my fair share of windows phone app development (8.0, 8.1, 10) I can confirm. Microsoft incentivized app development, and paid top game development companies millions and gave them featured placements for their half-assed windows phone ports.
And then as a regular joe you would actually put in the effort* to get things working well. Then you would watch these bug-plagued big name 3-star ports appear out of nowhere and usurp you on the top free lists and search results due to their favorable placements. And then you would move on to a fairer market, and when microsoft stopped paying them, the big app developers did too (not that they ever updated or fixed the bugs on windows phone releases.)
* Difficult as windows phone was the only mobile platform not supporting openGL in hardware and the top sold windows phones were incredibly low spec.
Give it a few more OS releases and Android will be the only one supporting GL.
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A couple of years ago we sent two people to a meeting at Microsoft to talk about a port of an existing Android/iOS app. The work was already funded so we were really just hoping for a free phone or two.
The report I heard back was that they treated it as an opportunity to try to sell us Office 365.
(The port never happened because the client's plans to roll out Windows phone to their staff fell through some time later.)
Windows phones themselves are fine. But two things were massive failures:
1. Microsoft created development tools that are not appropriate for real-world use cases and tried to push that on devs and companies, which failed spectacularly. The demand for apps which work on Windows desktop and Windows phone literally doesn't exist. It doesn't matter that Microsoft would have loved it if people built apps like that. If there is no demand for such apps they don't get built (and they didn't). You get garbage (compared to WPF or even WinForms) "metro" or whatever you call them now desktop apps that are intensely hated by Windows users and you get a WP app that you can't reuse to build an iOS or Android app... The UI was also completely different so you couldn't even really reuse much of the design. So no code sharing, no design sharing.
What .NET devs wanted was a way to build apps using C# that work on all mobile platforms (we never cared about a mobile app working on desktop). If you had given us that you would have had your apps purely by virtue of piggybacking on iOS, Android and .NET popularity. We complained about the retarded "multiplatform within the Windows ecosystem" approach from day 1 yet Microsoft released several iterations (not backwards-compatible, of course, so they were losing some devs each time) of this garbage before finally listening to the market and embracing Xamarin at which point it no longer mattered as WP was a joke. A LOT of people love C# and are willing to jump through hoops to develop multiplatform apps with it. XAML is also very cool. Microsoft had that part in the bag, yet completely failed to use this to their advantage. Imagine if when WP7 (or even WP8) was released Microsoft was able to say "here, you can now develop mobile apps in C# and they will also build for iOS and Android!" .NET devs would have jizzed in their pants.
2. Microsoft threw the existing WP users in the trash with WP7 -> WP8. My iPhone updated for like 7 years through god knows how many iOS versions. When I bought a new one, it felt almost exactly the same except faster due to better hardware. People were wary of buying a WP because they got burned once.
They even held a funeral for their competitors devices: https://www.engadget.com/2010/09/10/microsoft-celebrates-win...
This didn't age well.
Heh. I was an intern there when this happened. In fact I think I was in the float in front of this one. To be honest this was blown out of proportion a bit. It was an internal celebration of release, and each team picked a theme. Most in good fun. In retrospect the funeral themed-one... yeah... didn't age well, and was perhaps in bad taste (I can't recall which team this was). It was just a bunch of overworked PMs, devs, and testers having some fun and blowing off steam.
Microsoft has been tone deaf about a lot of things... This is a prime example. Not a lot of self awareness on their part. This was cringe worthy.
I'll file that next to the windows 7 release party: https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=22&v=1cX4t5-YpHQ
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Without a doubt this stunt marked the absolute death knell for WP...my God the arrogance of those people.
That is sickeningly hilarious.
The walk of shame.
Goodness gracious.
The one thing MS didn't try to incentivize independent app developers was to eliminate the 30% revenue cut MS would take on the sale of paid apps. I always thought it would have been a good differentiation as there were always complaints that it was getting too hard to for indies to make it in the iOS app store. Even if MS would have said they were waiving the commission during an introductory period of a few years it might have helped. It seemed penny wise, pound foolish to think they could charge the same skim that Apple does.
I recall they announced promotions like that as well. At one point I recall they would auto-cut at least in half for some amount of time if your app was chosen for the front page of the Store.
Since the Anniversary Update last year, sideloading has been enabled by default, too, if you wanted to sell apps outside the store, and that didn't magically attract indies either.
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Not sure it would have helped. Any rational high-profile dev will compute that 70 % * 100 000 downloads is better that 100 % of 1000 downloads.
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> For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc
I remember some of this vaguely. A friend of mine deep in the MS world was showing me some of what was going on, but this "ran promotions" - I dunno. I don't think I'm way out in "non-MS" land - I keep my finger on the pulse of a lot of tech communities. I didn't hear much about this except from a few friends deeply entrenched in MS. Perhaps there wasn't enough of an outreach program?
> Satya's not lying when they say they tried everything to incentivise app developers. It was a big focus of the company at the time.
Given that I've registered multiple times with them to download various SDKs in the past, perhaps... emailing me about what they were doing, because I might have had an interest in being part of that app development push?
Maybe some actual ads on non-MS tech-related websites, or outreach to local non-MS user groups might have helped? As someone who's run multiple local tech groups, and frequented many for years, this "big focus of microsoft" was never a blip on anyone's radar (AFAICR).
> giving away free phones
That's sort of the bare minimum you'd need to do.
I'm reminded a bit about the HP tablets with webOS. They charged $499 (because, IIRC, "that's the price for tablets" - because of iPads), sold for a few weeks, then discontinued. Loads of people picked them up at $150-$200, even with no apps. "Well, we can't win, let's close it all down", after spending $1B+ on acquiring the stuff they're giving up on in the first place.
That move was likely political. Half the leaders internally wanted to let it die but to shift blame they let "the other team" launch it anyways to let it fail and say "told you so".
I remember that story for tablets. Same was with Amazon Fire Phone.
But i don't know how you can write off $1B... because honestly even iPod or iPhone wasn't successfully from the beginning. So they invest years for that status.
Competitors make clones, release them and after two months declaring abandoning market. Totally non-sence for me!
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I loved the UI, design, consistency, etc. I liked it because it was straightforward and rarely notified me about anything.
I left because of w10m specifically. They took away the consistency. It felt as janky as Android does.
After I dropped and broke my last WP8 device, I had to decide whether I wanted to order another old WP8 phone online or just switch to Android. I switched to Android.
It's not nearly as nice as WP8 was but what can you do?
"but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem"
Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.
https://www.apptentive.com/blog/2017/06/22/how-many-mobile-a...
Your post and his comment do not contradict one another. Or rather, your interpretation of the data in that post is shaky.
Consistent with the data presented in that post:
-I download lots of one-time-use apps. They're useful, and I won't use a phone without them, and then uninstall them in a week (eg, city specific apps when traveling)
- I download lots of special use apps that contribute few app-hours most of the time, but are super critical when I need them (hiking apps when hiking, service-specific references when I'm working in the relevant department, etc)
-I download games (lots of them), play with them for a while, and then uninstall for a new game. Yeah, most are gone in a week or a month, but the ongoing process is valuable to me.
(Edit addendum:
-I have apps I use quasi-frequently and that contribute very few app-hours of interaction, but are still valuable. Eg, the couple minutes a day I use a task list, the five minutes a week I use FreshDirect, etc.)
And then, yes, there are a handful of core apps that get most of my usage (outlook, kindle, Netflix, messages, safari).
This is entirely consistent with those stats, and still places enormous value on the app ecosystem.
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> They may have an additional 25 to 30 apps installed, but only five of those are heavily used. The five non-native apps vary from user to user
Doesn't that suggest that while individual users only use a few apps, the union of apps that see significant use is much larger? So you need a wide variety of high quality apps to please a majority of users.
So it's not "none of my apps are available". It's more like "that one app that my gym uses for booking is iOS/Android only" or whatever. Finding a decent WM8 podcast app was virtually impossible back when I had a Lumia, IIRC.
The data you posted do not support the claim “People don't even use apps”, but instead only “most individual users do not regularly use a large number of apps”. But that doesn't mean that either the small number they use frequently or the larger number that they use infrequently are unimportant to the overall utility they derive from their phone, or that there aren't a large number of apps used regularly across any given platform.
Whatsapp? WeChat? Ueber? Ofo? Tinder?
I hardly use my phone for calls. In fact, I prefer Whatsapp or Wechat. And nope, I don't have netflix on my phone.
Yeah, I think that the focus on apps might have actually been part of their problem. How many consumers really saw anything about the platform that made it more appealing than competing platforms? Without a solid killer feature as a differentiator, the apps wouldn't matter.
I'm sure that it made a great measurable and a great excuse for failure, though. I don't doubt that the internal narrative would focus on that.
> Nuts. People don't even use apps [i]. They may have facebook or netflix installed - but then it gets real thin.
Anecdote from a lot of my friends, a lot of use use flashcard type apps to help learn languages and things like memrise etc... Dictionary apps to get word translations and so on.
So I'm going to place that article under: perhaps true in general, but not overly constructive to my group of people.
> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software), the customisability, etc. but the lack of apps ultimately made us move to another ecosystem.
From my experience, that wasn't the case. I didn't own a Windows Phone but one of my friends did. According to him, what forced him to move was an overload of animations which became very irritating. I can recall a comment that suggested how Windows phone exploited animations to cover the fact that it was too slow.
Yep, that’s exactly the reason why I hated it. Those animations looked nice at first but after a while they get so annoying and even launching a dialer took much longer than needed because of those flight animations.
Also I did not like the flat look and flat colors. All the apps looked the same, so did the icons. The best thing about App Store on iOS was the colorful variety of apps where each of them had a unique distinct look and it was a joy to expolore new wild apps on the marketplace.
Several of my friends and I loved Windows phone and I hate Windows (prefer Linux). Sounds weird, but I've always thought Windows Phone to be more elegant than Android.
Back in 2011, I bought an HTC HD7 from a friend who switched back to Android. I was very impressed by how fast Windows Phone 7 was especially the ultra-smooth scrolling. But, like you said, the animations were enough to drive you nuts. Way too much, I don't know what to call it, "swoopy" maybe. It was enough to make you dizzy. I ended up trading the phone for a Galaxy S and that was the end of Windows Phone for me.
That's very true for Windows Phone. The animations definitely got irritating.
> Most Windows phone owners I know (myself included) loved the design (hardware and software)
I don't love the design, but I like it.
Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen.
Yes, there are some bad designs in the Windows 10 Mobile, but all of them are fixable. And once those problems get fixed, it will be gorgeous.
I feel very sad about their current failure, and I don't think simply give up is a good choose.
Its a free market, and the market has spoken. I think its the right strategy for MS to accept that the market is just not going to accommodate yet another mobile ecosystem. And its not for lack of trying: they've been trying for over a decade now to break into the mobile OS market. They had tablets running a version of Windows much before iPad; they had "Smartphones" running windows much before 2007. There's gotta be something that they just can't get right about mobile OS (or probably its simply the fact that the market doesn't have space enough for yet another proprietary OS).
MS will do a lot better if it focuses on making android betters, supporting .NET apps in android (yay Mono!). Maybe in the future they could revisit the mobile OS thing and have better luck then but for the near future it looks very unlikely.
The mark of a good company is adaptability. Intel went from RAM chip maker to creating microprocessors, MS itself went from creating BASIC compilers to making OS's. With Azure, .NET, Office, Windows etc. I think they have enough areas to make money off. Its just their strategy of adapting windows to mobile devices didn't work.
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> Maybe some people believe the tile home screen is ugly, but they are more informative compare to icon based home screen.
Information changes but a UI should be static, a UI that changes based on what is available is a recipe for a poor user experience. I have a hard enough time navigating rows of icons (as opposed to a list of app names), I don't need the icons changing randomly.
Aside from that, one of the missing features of tiles was interactivity, on android I've had an MP3 player widget on my home screen since I first got an HTC hero and playing music is a core feature for my phone. As flashy as tiles were they didn't have that level of functionality.
They tried everything, except for open standards, foss, focus on user privacy or anything that would have have made them different.
That is pretty much the reason I didn't have a Windows phone. I would have considered it if it actually did promise privacy.
Free phone sounds nice, but tinkerers like me don't want to apply and get the approval lottery for shit. We wanted cheap phones. The Android ecosystem at that time was already matured to the point that you can get cheap no frills, no worries if you break it secondhands. It was an obvious choice when I could get a secondhand Android phone with all the stuff I could tinker with for $100, and that also gave me the unexplored freedom to get any ROM I want. I remember porting Cyanogenmod 9 on my shitty 2 year old OG Motorola Droid, and control every aspect of it.
I bought someone a Windows phone and they had the same feedback - big name apps not available (whatsapp, instagram, etc.)
I wanted to buy a Windows phone since I use none of these apps, but there was no hardware refresh or major announcements around Windows phones and that deterred me. I don't understand how MS went on to a successful Surface and failed phones, I would think they're similar markets - hype-driven, takes a few iterations to get right, etc. I bought the Google G2 and it was far from what an Android phone is today, but Windows phones seem to run on a no-upgrade strategy which is strange
I think that's close to the truth but really there has never been any product direction or commitment from MSFT. why would you build a product on that?
Surface isn't successful. It's a disaster. Just a well covered up one so far. Give it a couple of years and it'll be down the toilet as well. Consumer Reports dumped on them last year with a 25% failure rate within 2 years. Rather than deal with this, they go into denial and market market market mode.
The problem is that they're building products they want, not what the user wants. And when the user asks for something, they just say NOTHING and drown out all the negativity with blogs and hype and pointless communication paths to pacify the users who are pissed off.
On top of all that there is this personality cult around Satya where everyone is saying he's the second coming, the saviour and all that junk. Turns out that it's blinded marketing, the enterprise customers are getting shafted (me) and footing the bill for cock up after cock up after cock up.
Quality is gone. Privacy is gone. No one says anything. Everyone is voting with their feet.
Same turd of a company as ever.
There's definitely a shortage of apps compared to Android and iOS but I have WhatsApp and Instagram installed on the Windows Phone I'm writing this comment on right now. You can tell the Windows Phone version of apps are not a priority for the developers though.
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I stopped using the windows for the same reason. I loved that I could buy a performant phone for $50 when my $200 Android feels sluggish. But I hated not having any apps.
Specifically I hated all the shitty apps that had flooded the app store because of their half baked promotions.
All of their promotions incentivized churning out a bunch of shitty apps. Like paying people $100 per app, this created a lot of crap in the app store to wade through to find quality apps.
Instead they should have matched revenue or paid an extra 5 cents per download. Something to incentivize a dev to write one good app instead of 5 throw away apps.
Yeah, I won a WOWZAPP competition by making an HTML5 game in 2 days, wrapping it up in a Windows 8 app and publishing it to store. I got a Lumia 800 for it which ran Windows phone 7. When they already had Windows 8 devices out and the competition was to make Windows 8 apps. I still don't know what they expected me to do with this obsolete phone.
That phone was useless to me because there were literally no apps on the Windows 7 store. When I tried to sell it few days later, no one was even willing to consider it and I had to sell it for peanuts.
Wrong.
Take a look at another platform that Microsoft pushed into: game consoles. How did they break into game consoles? They bought an entire game studio, Bungie, and produced one of the most best selling games of all time (Halo) as an exclusive title. Nothing Microsoft did with Windows phone was on remotely the same scale. The fact that a movie of that scale would have been vastly more costly than the acquisition of Bungie and development of Halo is merely an indication of the fact that MS waited too long, not that nothing could be done.
Can confirm. Microsoft offered me $10k and free help with development to port my app.
Years ago, Microsoft indeed paid to have my app written for Windows Mobile. Totally free and hands-off, i just have to agree and it will be done.
(It was in Malaysia, and my website was very popular then.)
Drum Kit? I'm guessing $10k just wasn't worth it for such a hugely-popular iOS app?
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10k seems reasonable enough to port it. Why didn't you?
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Did they do what Apple did and setup a seed fund to get startups ready to compete with the big platforms?
See iFund (2008): https://www.macrumors.com/2008/03/06/ifund-to-offer-100-mill...
The fact is, you should incentivize funders/investors, not developers. The developers will follow if they have a hot new startup where they can (potentially) mint money using your seed capital.
However, I agree this only works if you aren't seriously late to the party.
There's an obvious incentive they haven't tried: guaranteeing a lower app store margin like 1-2% instead of the 30% cut that Microsoft currently takes.
Google and Apple have already convinced a sufficient number of users users that their app stores are essential, so they can continue to charge whatever they like.
Microsoft didn't have the same luxury, so they needed to change this. They never made the change and it's too late now, but I think if they did this a few years ago they would be in a better position.
A good amount of the "key apps" are free anyway, so a lower margin wouldn't have helped there.
I remember they started by introducing the same sort of toll than Apple. That was them shooting themselves in the foot.
This is what I thought too. If they're also going to charge in the ballpark of 30%, then they're not serious. They're not giving the proper incentive.
>they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc. But nothing was enough to get over the problem of the lack of an initial user base.
Is anyone else surprised that "giving away free windows phones" was not a recipe for success in terms of incentivising capable app developers?
Most every app developer already owns their favorite phone because they can afford it.
They should have also given away free phones to end users. And for the other users who bought stuff, they should have given them 100$ of credit to buy apps.
And then periodically rewarded great users with 100$. it would have been like a tax break for the users to spur the app economy.
Most apps make a pittance.
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The lack of apps was annoying at time, but what made me leave was probably Microsoft Edge. The rendering was clearly better than IE, but Edge would crash my phone, or become non responsive, or both so often (creators update on Lumia 640 LTE). If the browser doesn't work, and there are no apps, it doesn't make sense to have the phone.
I don't understand why Microsoft has keep IE/Edge around. It's just embarrassing. Event my technology illiterate friends and family rag on IE and everyone installs chrome these days. If they spend less time building IE and focused on other platforms they'd waste a lot less time for everyone including themselves.
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I really would love to see a Microsoft mobile device. My issue was lack of available devices on my carrier, and when I did find them they hardly were competitive with the available Android alternatives. I hope Microsoft does return to the Mobile OS market, but I hope they pull all the right moves off to get real traction going. I still remember having a code to be a Windows developer for free as a student but never had the time to build any apps so I never took advantage of my developer code.
I do hope Microsoft returns back at it someday. I hope they bring out "Super Phones" on every major carrier that truly compete. Also hope they don't bring some of the pain points of Windows 10 (forced updates, forced telemetry and what not). Google and Apple need a serious competitor. Ubuntu bailed and I wish they had not. It seems like a very specialized OS needs to be built and it needs to hit market on all major carriers with new things to offer that are worthwhile. Privacy would be a strong selling point if anyone else attempts it. I want a privacy focused and open source mobile alternative, feels like I'll wait a long time for it though. Microsoft has the resources to provide such an alternative though... Would be definitely different if they went that route.
Being able to compete is mostly having an app platform on par with iOS or Android. Precisely the point where Windows Phone is lacking. This is a situation I don't see changing, especially not without hardware.
Furthermore, releasing a phone with good hardware at a competitive price point means either losing money to push into the market (which I think MS has done the past few years with their mobile offerings), or having a supply chain to have good hardware at a low-enough price (something which Apple and Samsung already have).
I kinda doubt there will be a good third mobile option again. The choices currently are to target iOS to make money, or Android to reach more users and for most apps there's isn't much point in supporting anything else. Plus, there aren't that many apps built upon frameworks that would allow easy addition of a third build target.
There also doesn't seem to be much point in offering an open-source mobile platform. The partners you need to convince to offer phones with your platform don't care (much) whether it's open-source or proprietary. In Android's case the open-source-ness pretty much only matters for Amazon and a tiny fraction of users that install custom builds. Google has certainly tried to wrestle as much control of the platform back, both for control reasons, and to be able to provide a better user and update experience (Things a hardware vendor won't care much about. They make money when you buy the phone, not when you use it.).
I used to be a MSP from Mango to WP8.1. I will always be impress by everything MS did for devs and students. If you have the will to build an app, you could have, to help you, free licenses, free marketplace, free phone and tablet to test, free ms dev time to help you, free commercial time to help you share you app, free press coverage, free conferences, etc.
They did so much, sometimes I felt impostor to don't do more. So much money was here to support.
If you really want to build a platform and developers didn't come you should build part of the software youself or pay third parties.
That was Apple's strategy. They built some really great Mac OS X apps when they were the underdog, and offered them for free with the hardware. They also built (and bought) some great Pro apps which attracted a ton of customers. The iLife suite and even the iWork suite to some extent (I loved Keynote in college) were essential to me making the switch.
I wonder what would have happened if they competed on pure price. Like if they basically gave away 10m devices. That’s a small amount but it could have kickstarted something. App developers have to choose which platforms to support. The cost is nearly doubled if you go from just one to both dominant platforms. Adding a third would nearly triple it. It is not worth it if suddenly you can reach a whole lot of people. Going after developers is good if there isn’t a market already. Going after consumers might have created a critical mass where developers would have just showed up on their own.
Maybe a campaign to hand a new Windows phone to every college kid on campus would have worked. College kids aren’t flush with spending money, so a free phone would be a boon. But college kids also graduate and get jobs, making future phone purchases a possibility. Plus college kids tend to be trend setters for technology in situations like this.
Eh, I am rambling. People much smarter than me have probably already thought of this.
They practically did. I bought a Windows phone for $30 a couple years ago.
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Im still on the platform. I was holding out, hoping for something. But I guess my current phone will be my last windows phone. Sad.
I'm still on the platform as well (typing this on a Lumia 635). To be honest I only bought it as I wanted a cheap smartphone but it's served me very well. I don't really use that many apps (Baconit and Metrotube are the two I use the most), but the WinPhone 8.1 UI is probably the best phone UI I've ever used (I prefer it over iOS and Android). Thankfully I've already got my next phone lined up (Librem 5).
The platform will still be supported, but new hardware or features won't be coming, which is fine with me. If anything, I'll stick with MS for now and then switch to IOS sometime in the next few years.
You can still get the new HP Elite X3 and the Lumia 950 and 950XL on ebay for around $300.
Me too, guess I'm going to have to make this phone last until another alternative to iOS and Android appears. I've preordered a Purism Librem 5 as part of their crowd funding campaign so hoping maybe that comes to something.
Do apps matter much, after the top ones? All the volume is in the top 10 apps now. After the top 100, does it matter at all?
That's what I thought too. But the top 100 might be different for different people.
I couldn't find any incentives as a solo game developer earlier this year. I developed a game with React Native and thought it would be interesting to release a Windows Phone [1] version... but it was not. I think I only had one person install it, and that was a friend who I asked to try it out. Of course, the main reason is probably that my game is just not very compelling, or I failed with marketing. But I definitely won't be launching any more apps for Windows.
I would have loved to get a free Windows phone so I could have tested the game on a real device, but it makes sense that they can't just give away phones to random indie developers.
[1] https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/store/p/sudoblock/9np72dfcvk...
My wife complains bitterly that she is unable to keep her Windows phone. I wonder sometimes if this ecosystem was killed by "expectation disease" where success was defined as '1/3 the market or better'. It is a common problem of insecure BigCorp type thinking when trying to break into a market, it has killed Google in the social space. This is the kind of issue that really needs a 'peanut butter factory'[1] approach.
[1] The 'peanut butter factory' has been a silicon valley euphemism for a small team of engineers from a "big" company that have gone off to build a new project without having the big company drag them down.
The best thing a new phone platform could do is essentially create an App building framework like React Native that allows developers to build apps targeting the new platform and the existing platforms at the same time(maybe not as a first class citizen initially, but those platform devs and fill in the blanks). That's about the only way that, as an engineer, I"m going to give a shit about developing for your app platform. If I care, and I make cool apps, then the user base size doesn't matter, I'll still target it because it makes my life better as a developer.
Yes! I love my Windows 8 phone! I hated Windows 8 for desktops because it felt like they were trying to turn my PC into a cell phone. But the design is great for an actual phone! Unlike on iOS, the app icons can be dynamic and you can change their size and what's displayed. My Lumia 928 feels better in my hand than anything else I've ever handled, and the screen contrast and true black is great, even in direct sunlight. I love having a dedicated camera button, too. I actually don't personally care too much that there are so few apps.
I had a Windows Phone 7 and loved it but ended up not being able to afford the monthly payments at the time that was required for having a smart phone. I didn't have much of an app issue but that was because I didn't have the phone long enough. I have a co-worker that also had a Windows phone as his previous phone and liked it. He wanted to get another when it was time to upgrade but he couldn't, there just wasn't any available.
Microsoft decided that a great way to get apps for their phone would be to make a UI for both desktop and phone and force developers to use it. In a single stroke they alienated all their existing desktop developers while forcing potential phone app developers to have to think about far more complex problems. Their message to developers was that they must learn something new. And so they did. XCode.
Which is a real damn shame because WP was such a fine OS and was the REAL competitor to the iPhone in terms of UX and hardware design (Lumia line).
You know what would have been an incentive for me (and I guess thousand of other game devs) to support windows phone? Support for OpenGL ES.
So now with Apple leaving GL ES in the dust as legacy API, are you going to stop targeting iOS?
Just as side note, Microsoft did port ANGLE to WP.
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I got a Lumia 820 that way. I loved that OS and I'm sad it never got the recognition it deserved. If nothing else, a serious competitor to the other two major OSs with such radically different design might inspire Apple and Google to something beyond the tired old icons on a grid.
It was the first phone I'd bought in 7 years that didn't let you add your own ringtones.
That's how far behind it was.
I didn't get copy/paste for about a year. It's like you guys were -trying- to cargo-cult the iphone.
Unfortunately, Belfiore returned after his leave of absence.
God help you.
I loved it too, but my Nokia Lumia 800 never got updated. Loved the flow of things, it was fast, Whatsapp worked basically all I needed. But I did feel screwed as an early adopter. Why was I never able to run APKs? That would have helped so much...
Nope.
We're a mid-size SaaS app and not a single person from MS made any sort of overture to us apart from "you should develop for Windows Phone!". It would have cost us like 100-200k and 9-12 months of developer time to do this. And then again for 10. And provide support for the rest of time. Nope!
We laughed at them in the background and awaited its eventual death. That we didn't put a single second of effort into developing for this platform has finally been vindicated! :)
Forcing devs to rewrite stuff every major release made it pretty clear no one there cared about developers.
I think Microsoft could greatly improve developer support. I've sent my Edge extension in April and still have no response.
man, the windows app store was a joke.
a teenager could write something better in node/angular in a week
>For more niche apps they ran promotions for students and independent developers giving away free phones etc.
I remember they were giving Lumia 925's to computer engineering students here years ago if they made and uploaded an app. You can imagine the quality of the apps they were uploading. Most of them were slideshows or just a wall of text.
That's not how you incentivise app developers, that's how you inflate your numbers.
Back in the day the number of apps in the store was a major point in the mobile OS wars, though. Google and Nokia were both constantly compared to Apple and told how they need to improve.
And yes, one response was to inflate numbers with random crap. Nokia created a developer tool to convert web pages to native apps -- basically just a webview wrapper with bundled web content. Ovi Store was half full of these "apps".
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I loved my Lumia 920, and if only there were apps, I would not be using iPhone right now. Major things I've missed that were available on android/iOS:
banking app - some other banks had an app for WP, but I didn't want to switch banks
public transit route planner - there were some, iOS and android had THE app for my city with really good bus arrival estimates
official public transit app - I couldn't buy tickets from my phone
official city parking app - had to go to parking teller and pay there in friggin cash, now I just set the zone and am done with it
even the most popular taxi app was not available
Hearthstone - I like this rng card game
I know the feeling; several years ago my mom bought a Windows Lumia phone for $30 new, the hardware specs were nice, but the apps were just non existent, and though it's gotten 1000 times better its still very lacking. Also the camera is surprisingly high quality and fast.
My 5S is going to cost $50 for a new battery and screen - and it's still worth a few hundred more new; however her phone's HW specs are still mostly better than mine, except I think the RAM which is the same.
A year ago I remember thinking If microsoft wanted to save windows 10 mobile's life I think they should have put a large amount of that cross-platform smartphone programming effort into trying to make Win10 Mobile capable of running some android apps, the desktop version has a linux subsystem after all. that way they could have expanded their user base and made it a more attractive platform, especially with the lower cost.
Making 10 Mobile decently Popular for any reason would have given developers a good reason to switch to xamarin for developing native apps on every platform, win-win.
Alas they didn't do anything encouraging enough to grasp that potential double benefit...
It's almost like if you shit on developers for a decade people don't wanna bother with your new platform.
It is my understanding that MS has given up on ARM. Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones, which partly solves the "app" problem. They just run a regular windows on the phone.
I've got one in my pocket right now: Asus Zenfone 2. It just runs regular Android. Even has an "Intel Inside" logo on the back.
Windows has never had great dynamic scaling, so trying to run regular apps on a phone would be a nightmare of tiny click targets. Metro apps would scale better, but that was the whole point of UWP.
IMO they've given up slightly too early. They could have written an Android-on-Windows compatibility layer, or various other things, but Microsoft just can't handle a market where they aren't dominant. The only way they could leverage their dominance would be to break Exchange ActiveSync and say "if you want your calendar on your phone, it has to be a Windows phone".
And Intel have pulled back from the low-power area (mobiles, Edison) because they're not competitive there. Maybe the same "can't function when not market leader" problem.
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That doesn't make much sense, apps made for mouse and keyboard on a large screen won't magically become usable on a small touchscreen...
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> Sooner or later there will be x86 based phones
Sure, but right now Apple and their ARM designs are running away from everybody else. Plus Windows is terrible from a security and power consumption point of view. Can Microsoft fix that without breaking everything?
I think MS is conceding the entire phone space. Full screen form factors (like laptops is and large tablets) are very important but for small devices I don't think they can compete.
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That UX will just be amazing
Windows Mobile is my favorite example of ecosystems being more valuable than individual user experiences. They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS. But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing.
So far we've seen:
- Amazon fail - Microsoft fail - Facebook fail (killed internally)
All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance.
What I see are all the big players lining up to take a crack at Augmented Reality when the tech hits a sweet spot sometime in the next 5-10 years. That's the reason for the crazy investments in MagicLeap, etc. it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.
The irony of the Microsoft side of the story is that they tried many times to get into mobile. They had a full-powered smartphone, including apps and a web browser, for many years before the iPhone.
I remember going to a store around 2005 or 2006 and deciding, "if I can get slashdot to load, I'm going to buy this phone." I couldn't figure it out! I don't know if I just couldn't figure it out, or the phone was misconfigured, but either way, I just didn't want something so difficult to use in my pocket. From what I remember, the browser was buried under a tree of menus.
When I first tried the iPhone in 2007, it was very easy to figure out how to load slashdot!
Later, when someone showed me all the "cool" things about the Windows phone, they were just a snazzy UI that had totally unintuitive features that I would never use. I just couldn't see the point of the phone; except as a toy for people who like to tinker.
>they tried many times to get into mobile
Tried? When the iPhone came out, Windows Mobile had already existed for 7 years and had 40%+ of the smartphone market. I'd say that's a little more than "tried".
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WeChat has done that to some degree. Given that WeChat is basically a platform at this point, one could imagine a WeChat phone coming out in china, bypassing Android completely. Not sure what would be the point though.
A wechat phone would be obvious and I don't know why they don't do it. Remember that Google play and all the other play services are not available in China.
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Aren't Android phones in China already shipping without the Google Play store? So I see them as rivals to the Google Android ecosystem.
Don’t forget Mozilla, Ubuntu, Nokia and Blackberry.
Plus Tizen and Jolla.
Let's see what will happen with the Purism Librem 5. Obviously, they just just a very small niche player, just like the Copperhead OS guys and Silent Circle.
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You're still missing:
- Palm/HP webOS
- Intel Moblin
- Samsung Bada
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- Amazon fail - Microsoft fail - Facebook fail (killed internally)
All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance.
It still seems like another way of failing. Microsoft tried a different OS from scratch, while Facebook and Amazon just versioned Android-
> it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.
The difficulty there is at least 90% of the AR market will be passive experiences, and at least half of those will be hand held, which basically means Apple and Android have already won half of the AR market, they can just photocopy their way to market share the way Microsoft did in the 90s.
And the trouble for headset makers is that handheld market will put some serious network effect pressure on them.
The hope I see is that technical differentiation will provide the moat against Apple and Google, but I have a hard time imagining what tech is going to be so hard for them to copy.
The most sensitive users will just stick to handheld where fidelity doesn't matter. And the most adventurous users will just go where the content is. The HiFi segment is the entirety of VR early adopters right now, but I see them as a thin minority squeezed between those other groups in the endgame (motion averse and content focused).
Although fidelity has some virtuous cycles with content production. So there might be a strategy there for Facebook or Microsoft.
But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up,
But there was also a genuine sense of excitement about Windows Phone 7, they had some single-digit marketshare, the other ecosystems were not as big as they are now, and Android was pretty bad at the time.
I think one of their fatal mistakes was the Windows Phone 7 -> Windows Phone 8 transition where they left many early adopters out in the cold (IIRC none of the WP7 phones could run WP8).
I agree that building an ecosystem was a large part of the problem, but Microsoft also messed up royally by making a hard cut in the platform when it was just starting to take off.
Amazon is a bit of a weird one and it's hard to really say they "failed"
Their Fire phone failed, for sure, but they have had success with some of their Fire products. Fire TV is nearly as big as Chromecast & Roku, for example, all 3 of which dwarf Apple TV, and of course Kindle was a smashing success. The Fire tablet is also seeing some success.
But these products don't hinge on app support, crucially, they are just content delivery platforms for Prime.
By that logic Microsoft didn't fail because Office is still widely used.
Just because Amazon branded their phone under the same brand as their successful tablets and streaming sticks doesn't make the phone any less of a failure.
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> Facebook fail (killed internally)
Interesting. What was the Facebook mobile OS?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Facebook_Home
http://www.htc.com/us/smartphones/htc-first/
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I guess the Facebook Home app was the tip of the iceberg that we saw?
Facebook didn't fail. You are not seeing their moviment with React Native & open source ecosystem (and the people saying that FB is doing "free" work aren't seeing this either, as FB is looking for a big chunk in the app development, and getting it).
This is why the latest tool I did for Windows still was based on WinForms. Because you know the old crappy stuff will be supported forever and the new shiny better stuff (WPF was pretty cool!) will be deprecated within two years and probably will not get significant developer traction. With a lot of confusing marketing from Microsoft. I don't think even the guru's within Microsoft itself can sum up all the different .Net versions that are out there and what they mean from the top of their heads.
As a punishment, the .net framework owners should be forced to learn and recite by heart the .net standard compatibility matrix!
That's just part of growing pains. I imagine that when Microsoft finishes their long term plan for .NET the layers will basically be:
.NET Core - implements .NET Standard.
Everything else is layered on top of .NET Core: .NET Framework (Windows), Xamarin (Linux, MacOS GUI, Android, iOS).
So basically everything in use will support .NET Standard.
Retconning is a bitch :p
Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.
On one side, I'm glad that declarative app UIs can now be built on a web, on the other side - come on, Microsoft, we could have skipped a whole jQuery era and be somewhere else with the web now.
And react is still missing a big library of standard, well documented components with accesibility, performance and all the edge cases built in.
> Aaah, WPF. It's basically React (Native and hw accelerated!), 10 years earlier.
I'd love if that were true, but of course the big selling point of React Native is that it works on several platforms. WPF works on one, and only a desktop one. Well, now that WP is dead at least.
If WPF ran on iOS / Android, hell even if it just ran on MacOS, I think there'd be a lot more devs building apps in it than JavaScript.
It looks like WPF will be supported for the forseeable future, but I get your overall point
We'll see.
I think the netstandard -> all platforms approach, combined with the aggressive depreciation of old .Net 4.6.x versions is a road map for the future.
Maintaining two entire release chains, the 4.x and the .Net core 2.x, is an impossible long term strategy.
I would be absolutely astonished if the 4.x line is quietly folded away and depreciated ('unsupported') once the netstandard surface area means the code bases that no longer run on the .Net core fall to significantly small fraction.
At that point there will just be 'one' .Net again, and it will be .Net core, on all platforms.
Significantly, there seems little to no indication (https://github.com/dotnet/core/issues/43) that winforms and WPF are going to .Net core.
You might argue that Microsoft is a legacy beast, and they won't abandon their developers by dropping support for old versions, but they already are doing that in the 'you can install it, sure, but it'll never get any more updates' (#1, #2), so you know.
Don't bet the farm on a WPF app. Just saying.
#1: https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/dotnet/2015/12/09/support-e...
#2: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/17455/lifecycle-faq...
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WinForms, WPF, Silverlight, ... it doesn't matter. The whole .NET Framework 4.x and .NET Core 1 have the "legacy" tag on. Their new thing is .NET Core 2. The rest moved on to cross-platform.
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Had Microsoft's acquisition strategy been different, they could have significantly boosted WM's hopes. The lack of official apps for Whatsapp and Instagram on WP were user's biggest complaints by far. Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 and Whatsapp in 2014 for a combined total of $20 billion.
In roughly the same period, Microsoft bought Skype, Minecraft and LinkedIn for a total of around $36 billion, the bulk of that accruing to LI's price. I get that MS is enterprise-focused, but those prices seem completely out of whack with what they actually got in value. Whatsapp, Google and Apple all offer built in video chat for consumers and LI's value to anyone outside of recruiting agencies is dubious.
> LI's value to anyone outside of recruiting agencies is dubious.
This is exactly the reason why LinkedIn needed the acquisition. I agree with you that the $26B price tag makes no sense given that LinkedIn needed this deal more than Microsoft did.
> The software giant will pay $196 a share - a premium of almost 50% to Friday's closing share price.
http://www.bbc.com/news/business-36519766 https://archive.fo/SoaO6
I think Windows Mobile should have followed through with its bridges, particularly the Android Bridge that it unceremoniously burned.
ref https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-... https://archive.fo/qtqcK
I completely understand the acquisition of Skype which was the undisputed king of video chat in its prime. It has since languished for any number of reasons, (probably relating to Microsoft's management but I'm not sure).
But I agree, a decent acquisition strategy could have done wonders for their ecosystem. Instead of constantly making and shutting down competitors to popular products, buy the popular ones. There was a time before now when Evernote would have been a nifty target, before they collapsed under their need to make money. There are plenty of amazing music platforms that people care about which aren't Groove.
I'd completely forgotten that Microsoft had actually bought LinkedIn. Even though now I recall seeing the news, until you mentioned it I was thinking they just had a partnership or something going on.
I agree that they overpaid but I think you are missing something big: they didn’t buy LI to improve Windows Phone, they bought it to integrate with Outlook and give their Enterprise SAAS products like Dynamics an edge in the war with Salesforce. I work at a financial firm and LI is essential to the long sales process for our applications.
An official WhatsApp app has existed since forever and is actively maintained. You probably mean Snapchat?
If only I could properly reprogram this WP8.1 phone I have here, it would've been much more interesting.
But rooting/jailbreaking (in WP world called "Interop unlock") has always been awkward and possible only for the most popular types of WP: Lumia, Samsung.
To write programs, it requires me to install Windows 8 or 10 — can't do with Windows 7 or Linux.
Even if I write a program, this phone requires special developer unlocking online for "sideloading" two apps maximum at a time, another arbitrary awkward limitation which can be circumvented by shuffling around with an SD card: loading an app into phone, moving the app to SD, disconnecting the SD, loading another app and so on.
WP8.1 does have an ability to install an app from a file directly, but only if it is signed with special enterprise signature, and that isn't cheap.
Of browsers, only IE and IE-based browsers exist for WP, and that means no proper customization and of course no ad blocking.
So the platform looked quite hostile to me and I wasn't motivated to explore any further.
And then those MBA types are wondering why their "business strategy" is not working. The same applies to the Windows Store on Desktop. All that walled garden nonsense they are trying to impose is not going to work. The only thing I could seriously recommend to those clerks is to eat their neckties and finally become living human beings.
> All that walled garden nonsense they are trying to impose is not going to work
It seems to "work" for Apple, unfortunately. I can't see any business giving up on the prospect of having a 30% cut of everyone else's software ...
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The joke on Windows Phone was always the browser. It was essentially a stripped down version of desktop IE. They never fixed it - the only Microsoft phone to ship with a usable browser (Edge) was Windows 10 Mobile, and they silently killed the whole Microsoft smartphone product line on the same day it was officially released.
I see a lot of people going on about incentives. Actually the simple problem is that MSFT know how to effectively fuck up a product:
1. Schizophrenic product direction.
2. Entire platform change half way through.
3. Quality control issues galore.
4. Regional issues galore.
5. Reinventing wheels, badly.
It's just crap. That's happening to windows 10 too. It's just not quite as far down the toilet.
I think part of the problem is that they actually try to push innovation (e.g. new UI paradigms with Metro), but then run into several vocal minorities, backtrack a bit and try to find a middle ground. From the outside, it then looks like a random zig-zag course, but it's much more an iterative minimization of "mean square pain" among their fairly large user base.
Communication could often be better though.
I think it's more that they hire personalities and form personality cults. Personality cults can't be seen to fail by investors due to the CYA culture so they just burn off a cliff and explode when they hit the bottom of the ravine.
Previous discussion on windows phone's death - "Who Killed Windows Phone?" : https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/10/9/16448280/a...
My first memory of windows phone was running wp7 on an htc hd2. At the time it was curiously interesting since I was writing code with WPF. In the beginning were definately some interesting aspects on paper - the legitimized 'jailbreak' mode, decent multi-tasking for it's time, writing apps with visual studio/c# (which felt much better than xcode at the time, and had a community defining many of the initial reactive/mvvm work used in many places today). But watching friends purchase Lumias that didn't get updates for wp8 months later showed just how much has to be done on a support front, especially for a new platform.
Apple was the 1st and got to dictate the terms of their walled garden. The told Adobe from day 1 to get lost with flash, but for a wall it had walls amazingly low for what had been tried in the past. And people lost their minds with excitement, except those pesky open source kids.
Google looked around and said we want in but how? Get rid of the wall and let any carrier and everyone use it. All the carrier's saw they could never get to market as fast and cheap as this so they begrudgingly accepteded in the face of Iphone taking huge marketshare an growing.
MS came late with an expensive phone, a walled garden and no software(but hey kid why don't you build some for me for free). What were they expecting?
I guarantee that they would have loved to tie your phone to an Xbox live account and make you pay 15 a month to text. That was probably the end goal and they were trying to work backwards towards it.
In just about any market, there are two to three market leaders.
- The first is the quality leader, who has the highest quality but also most expensive products. They sell low quantity but with high profit margins. (Apple)
- The second is the quantity leader, who has the lower quality but also the least expensive products. They sell with low profit margins but in high quantity. (Android)
- The last is the buy-in leader, who uses compliance or other methods of tying people to their product. It doesn't matter the quality or price point, because people are buying it for other reasons.
Traditionally, this third one was Blackberry in the mobile phone market with buy-in for enterprise. With the decline of Blackberry, it was a pretty sound strategy (at the time) to try and take that market share with Microsofts enterprise buy-in.
The problem is that Blackberry declined because the enterprise buy-in declined. Android and Apple began making it easier to access work-related functions on their platforms, and you no longer needed a separate phone to do it.
The saddest part of the story was that Nokia's amazing hardware division was lost because of this. Sure, Nokia made some classic innovator's dilemma errors, too, but they were still huge at the time Samsung got into Android (about 2x as big in phone market share). About a year or two later they decided to go with Windows Phone - the ever 2% OS of the mobile market, because it was "different".
It was stupid, and also the final fatal mistake that Nokia made. It was clear Android was well on its way to become the "Windows" of smartphones, which meant, ironically, that WP would be relegated to being at best the macOS or Linux of the mobile market. Plus, Android already allowed OEMs to be "different".
Nokia was basically making an argument for a "different ecosystem" at that point. But they should've known that it was too late to attract developers to a third ecosystem. Android had to fight hard to even reach more or less parity with the iOS ecosystem in terms of revenue for developers, even with its 5x larger market share. There was no hope WP would win in these conditions.
Nokia was too invested in Symbian, which was ill-prepared for the new world of rich smartphone experiences. As a much older platform, it had been architected around some faulty fundamental assumptions, like the phone processor only having a single core. Nokia also had an army of middle management internally which had built their careers on Symbian and would have lead an internal revolution had Nokia pivoted to Android back when it was opportune to do so.
Nokia didn't go with Windows Mobile because it thought it was the superior platform. It went with a different platform because it had become painfully clear to said middle management that Symbian could not be economically technically adapted for modern smartphone hardware, that sales were tanking as a result. And then Nokia went with Microsoft instead of Android because Microsoft gave them a boat load of money to do so, whereas with Android, Nokia would've had to build everything from scratch, and it wasn't clear anymore that they'd have the resources to do so.
Nokia's story is, more than anything else, of how technical debt can kill a company.
Eat the cost of the super phone. Make it super easy to use, develop and distribute. 5% or even flat appstore fee. Then maybe. They did it with the Xbox, but I think they got lucky with the timing on that one.
This is like them releasing an 8bit console with no games and just as expensive. In 1988, when everyone already owned a Nintendo or Sega.
Microsoft was there before Apple and Google. Remember Windows Mobile 6
This is karma for the way they started their 'Windows Smartphone' project, aka 'Stinger' (their internal name). They partnered with UK-based Sendo, who should have been their go-to-market partner, until Microsoft nicked all the code and gave it to HTC. They, in turn, partnered with Orange to bring out the SPV. How do we know it was Sendo's code? becuase it had Sendo's bugs - the eact version could be determined by which bugs it had and didn't have.
When Microsoft starts out like this, they deserve every little failurethey get!
Refs: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2003/01/06/microsofts_masterpla... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_SPV
I wanted to develop for Windows Phone, I really did. I even bought two phones, hoping that my experience with the first one would be fixed with the second.
But I just couldn't: getting the environment to work required me to upgrade my version of Visual Studio, upgrade my version of the OS, pay a developer fee (or send an e-mail with a scan of my ID and grade transcript to get it waived as a student). And even after sorting all those obstacles, the IDE was so buggy that I couldn't even place a date picker object.
The impression I got was: you can develop for WP, as long as you do it the way we like it (OS version, Visual Studio version) and invest about a hundred dollars getting up to spec.
Compared to Android's "here's the free IDE for your OS of choice", I'm not surprised developers weren't thrilled.
But that's how development for iOS is too, probably even worse because you also need to buy the whole computer in order to develop in it (I know there are other ways, I'm just considering the way most developers do). But this model still successfully works for Apple.
Developing for Android is really amazing. But the real deal is the phone's market share. It doesn't matter much how good or crap is your experience creating apps for a specific platform. At the end of the day it's about how many users will be downloading your app. Apple and Android has the market. Windows does not have it.
This isn't surprising, really. Windows Phone has been poorly for a long time.
While I understand Microsoft's efforts at trying to approach the mobile space, it does seem that it's often at the expense of their core product - very similar to how Google nearly crippled their core offering by integrating everything with Google+.
I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks.
Windows is extremely well sunk into the enterprise market, and neither Linux nor Mac are at all focusing sufficiently on it to displace them.
Linux isn't user friendly enough, and Mac's support policy is a complete no go for enterprise.
If a Ubuntu in 2017 isn't user friendly I really don't know what that phrase is even supposed to mean.
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Every enterprise I have worked at had both linux and mac available to developers. Is this not your experience? You seem to present as truth the opposite of what I have lived.
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Partner has a Chromebook, and it's really rough around the edges. 'Simple' things like file management/association is a pain. And it's been pretty buggy. Vanilla OS with no 3rd party plugins. If the OS is neglected and not matured it could easily go the same way.
They have a lot going for them in the desktop market still. Apple targets only the high end market (at least in terms of prices), Chromebooks come with a set of constraints that many can not overcome.
>I'm impressed that despite all of this, though, they've managed to keep desktop dominance, even with the rise of of Chromebooks and Macbooks.
It's simple: Chromebooks are crippled by the mostly-web concept and Macbooks only cater to (a part of) the more affluent end of the market.
I worked in IT support for a while, and saw that many business apps are expected to come with a browser interface now. If companies could be weaned from their dependence on Office then Chromebooks would take off. Eliminating the support issues for Windows would be a big deal.
I don't think the problem was primarily the lack of apps but a major reason to use Windows mobile.
With iOS you get the high end hardware and deep integration with Apple's ecosystem.
With Android you get deep integration with Google's services and a wide range of devices in prices and features.
What did you get with Windows mobile?
Performance at a low price point. I mentioned this elsewhere but when I was using a Windows phone, I'd buy $30-$50 windows phones and love them. When I eventually made the switch to a $40 Android phone is was borderline unusable so I had to pay for $300 Nexus.
I think that was the idea of Nokia. You get high end hardware with MS services.
But MS services weren’t as good years ago, and they didn’t have many apps, and they kept burning people by not letting them upgrade to a new major OS release.
> What did you get with Windows mobile?
From a consumer point of view, not much.
There's a lot there for businesses though. If you employ a bunch of .Net developers for your in-house applications, Windows Mobile is a pretty natural way get a mobile app developed.
The problem there is that a business has employees and those employees don't want to own Windows Phones personally and at the same time businesses don't want to provide each employee a company phone either.
But then, if there are bunch of .NET developers, there's Xamarin.
You got high-quality cameras on Nokia Lumia phones. Which apparently was not enough...
When MS released the first version of Windows NT it was buggy as hell. Internal to MS they ran Banyan VINES. Bill ordered it to be ripped out and replaced with NT. It was a mess. All the coders in MS quickly started to fix all the stuff that effected them. NT 3.51 came out pretty quickly after and to be honest it was quiet good for the time. For as much money as they spent trying to get people to buy the phone or write apps, they could have given a phone to each employee and family member, told them they would pay for the cell service for a year. You do not have to take it but all other phones are banded from the office. Every app you submit you get X number of RSUs. Pretty sure all the needed apps would have turned up in that year.
Love Bill. He was the type.
One cool move on Microsoft's part can be releasing Microsoft's version of Android. The main problem is Google Play Services. But since MS almost has parallel offerings for all Google Services they can create an "API" compatible version of Google Play services. This way users will be able to install all the current Android applications which are available on Play Store.
This can convert Android into an Oligopoly instead of Google's Monopoly.
> But since MS almost has parallel offerings for all Google Services they can create an "API" compatible version of Google Play service
Here's a bit of trivia: Microsoft filed an amicus brief[1] supporting Oracle's position that API's are copyrighted in Oracle v. Google.
Not long after this, coincidentally (or not) that Microsoft canceled project Astoria[2], which implemented Android APIs on Windows 10 Mobile. If they implement Google's API, and Google were to sue, it would be trivial to prove wilful infringement by citing the amicus brief (they knew it is wrong and they did it anyway).
1. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/02/20/oracle_and_world_vs_...
2. https://www.windowscentral.com/microsoft-officially-cancels-...
Why would anyone bother with a copy of android when the original just works? it makes no sense.
Microsoft strategy was just bad. It tried to copy the iPhone when it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones. The only person who got something out of the Nokia deal is Elop, which is curiously similar to how bad Macromedia/Adobe deal was. What is left of both deals? nothing.
Microsoft isn't that good at consumer hardware, the only exception is the Xbox. Look at the surface book, full of issues when it should have been a hit.
Eventually MS will try a comeback in the mobile OS market, in 5/10 years, because it's essential for MS survival. But it needs to build the services to back that up.
> Microsoft strategy was just bad. It tried to copy the iPhone when it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones.
That wouldn't have worked either. Microsoft has the desktop market today because they had it in 1981 when the IBM PC was released. Operating systems have huge network effects.
There is very little they can do today that will cause them to lose that. People hate that there is no simple off switch for all the Windows 10 telemetry, but is it causing all those people to switch to Ubuntu? No. They're mostly sticking with Windows 7, and when support runs out on that, they'll grit their teeth and use Windows 10. Because they have no choice. They need Office and Photoshop and Active Directory and some weird printer thing from their weird printer support company and a dozen other things like that. Which kind of maybe have Linux equivalents but some of them aren't as good and all of them have some initial switching cost which would all have to be taken on at the same time. So when the choice comes to either let Microsoft punch you in the face or walk away, most people still aren't willing to walk away.
But with Android the shoe is on the other foot. Microsoft can't dislodge Android for the same reasons that Canonical can't dislodge Windows.
> It tried to copy the iPhone when it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones.
We tried this. Manufacturers weren’t very interested because the users weren’t. Samsung and HTC and others made windows phones and they stopped investing because they didn’t sell well enough.
The Nokia purchase was a reaction to the reality that no one else was going to build Windows phones in the future.
Disclosure: Microsoft employee (not involved in phone or OS)
I don't know that the Macromedia deal was all that bad.
While there are few, if any, surviving remnants of Macromedia software within Adobe, the acquisition of Macromedia both eliminated its most serious competitor and provided an influx of engineering talent.
Using stock price as a surrogate for overall performance, they went from ~$35 at the time of the acquisition to ~$155 today, with annual net income rising from $600M to $1.6B today.
>it should have tried to copy its own strategy on PC, which is creating a OS and letting other companies build Windows Phones.
Google/Android beat them to the punch. I don't think that would work for a third entrant.
Lab126 ships an Android-based OS that will never be Android. One reason was to extend APIs (edge peek events for the Fire Phone, for example).
> The only person who got something out of the Nokia deal is Elop
I think this wasn't a bad outcome for Nokia. Android was quickly killing Symbian, and I doubt Nokia would've been too successful using Android.
They kept all the patents, maps, and $7.2B that allowed them to considerable strengthen their other business.
The best combination for me is to have high quality hardware Surface Phone, just like Surface Laptop, using stock Android and high quality, stability and usability, Microsoft apps and Microsoft microservices. Two most important hardware optimizations are security and data connectivity.
And it too would have failed miserably and probably faster than the Amazon Fire phone. Android without Google Play Services is an instant failure.
Microsoft is cooperating with Cyanogen OS
https://www.theverge.com/2016/2/22/11092050/cyanogen-microso...
CyanogenOS doesn't exist anymore. But they're selling a Galaxy S8 Microsoft Edition with included Microsoft apps.
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> We have tried VERY HARD to incent app devs. Paid money.. wrote apps 4 them.. but volume of users is too low for most companies to invest.
The problem is that no customer I knew was keen to have to pay for the same app three times. Android and iOS cost enough money. Windows Mobile only choice would be to overcome one of those two platforms quickly, but it started the race way too late. Everybody was hoping it died quickly. A market split evenly in 3 would be a budget nightmare.
However let me say that only one platform would be unhealthy. Nothing good comes from mono cultures, as IE demonstrated after winning the browser wars some 15 years ago.
Now we have two garbage GUIs without pressure to improve. More competition is better!
Hey, PalmOS was there early and with a decent UI. But the hardware was not up to the task.
It's really a pity that no one interested in mobile picked up Palm. HP - what did they do with it other than throw it away?
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Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL. I really think the device were great. However, they made the fatal mistake on this, the price point.
They priced the 950/950XL same as iPhone and Android flagship phones. Yes, I do understand the 950 and 950 XL have flagship hardware, however, you do not priced it as your phone is in high demand.
If they priced the phones at 300, it would sell a lot more. Developers do not want to develop for an OS with no users.
Not only the hardware price was bad. The fees to developer was also bad. If I recalled correctly, they also want to takes the same amount of fee as Apple and Google. If I was Microsoft, I would not charge developer any fees for 3 years just to get them on board.
> Microsoft got a chance to steal market shares and established themselves as an alternative to iOS and Android when they introduced Lumia 950 and 950XL.
The hardware was never the problem. Lots of great devices shipped with Windows Phone.
(Disclosure: Microsoft employee)
At some point I looked for Windows Phone device with a decent audio output so I could enjoy my lossless paid subscription to services like Tidal.
I wasn't able to select a Windows Phone. There were several models but none of it made an explicit accent on sound quality. As a last resort I looked to external DACs and it turned out that Windows Phone didn't support them either.
I just went and bought a second hand iPhone 6 with a good discount. The sound quality I got from it was decent and I became a happy Apple customer one more time (had iPhone 4 and other Apple gears before).
So a statement that the hardware was never the problem is a bit of a stretch. Everything accumulates pretty quickly and every detail has an impact.
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Not for WP10, specifically.
Continuum was to be the killer feature but they shot themselves in the foot by releasing the Lumia 650 with such mediocre specs that didn't support it.
“Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has argued that the company isn't out of the mobile hardware business, insisting that its HoloLens augmented reality headset is a mobile device.”
I hope the rest of the industry remains paranoid. Nadella does have a point. Mobile will evolve and in 5-10 years, watches, glasses, etc could usurp a significant share of the mobile phone market.
It can be easier to claim a new market rather than take an established one. Windows is still close to 90% of the desktop makes share, but it matters a lot less today.
This is partly why I've not put much stock into "Surface Phone" rumors, but am listening for whatever fascinating tidbits I can hear from the rumor mills of a "HoloPhone".
Back when Microsoft started started throwing in the towel and put their phones on fire sale I loaded up on $30 Lumia 640's (how could you not at that price for a 5" LTE in 2015?)
They've served me and my family well since. The lack of apps has a flip side... I'm not terrible worried about malware. ;) And I'm not worried about my kids getting too distracted by all the games, etc available on iOS/Android.
I picked up a Lumia 535 cheap mid/late 2015 and am still using it today, with W10, like a dream. I love how simple it is compared to when I see family members and they throw their phone at me wanting me to have a look at it to fix something.
I spend 2 hours yesterday morning trying to get screenshots off of my mothers Samsung galaxy something-or-other android phone and the thing is just a complete mess, photos stored in 3 separate places, some pictures in one place but not another, some available but when trying to BT to me her phone "cant fetch" the photos.. I almost had a breakdown. She also had a malware problem about half a year ago where when she turned on wifi it was uploading for hours sucking up the entire internet connection and my brother couldn't play his online games. Could not find out what was uploading or where it was uploading to but it required a complete reset. Even when working correctly she cant do tasks because she is at times bombarded with notifications from apps that fill her screen up and just seem to stress her out.
Problems like this are common with my family and mother unfortunately, she had a windows phone (back when it was Nokia making them) and never had issues apart from "lack of apps" which is why she switched when her contract allowed.
Hope you enjoyed my rant/blog-post.
I loved WP back when I used it. It got out of my way. Its auto-complete was better than anything I'd used before or since (though a friend has it, and he says this has degraded over time?) Anyway, I use Android now because of Republic Wireless. It is a real shame that Android took off instead of WP.
>> The lack of apps has a flip side... I'm not terrible worried about malware. ;)
Is this something people should be worried about on a phone?
You should if you have Android and install apps from third party stores / websites. But sometimes even Google Play Store has malware.
Quite sad how WinDev torpedo the WP7 efforts with the WP reboots (WP 8, WP 8.1, UWP).
For quite some time WP was the best developer experience between iOS, Android and WP, regarding tooling and available SDK programming languages.
This doesn't mean anything, to me. I just read "Windows 10 Mobile as a standalone OS is going away." Remember that Windows OneCore is a thing, and that Windows on Arm is a thing. They are eliminating all the "one-off" operating systems and consolidating all of the features into OneCore.
I am not pining for Windows Mobile (despite owning several throughout the past decade) I just think that Windows OneCore will make Windows available on phones again if Microsoft ever have a good reason to enter the mobile market again.
Might be, but given how they managed the whole story, they will get UWP apps that work by accident on phones.
Just like Google and Apple get phone apps that work by accident on tablets, but feel out of place otherwise.
UWP apps that work by accident on phones is not a bad strategy, though. Good application design is responsive, same reason responsive became a huge buzzword in web dev. Even if you are just designing with Desktop in mind: there are hundreds of combinations of monitor resolutions and DPI settings, and everyone has their own personal preferences for how they arrange applications on those monitors. Windows apps have always been resizable and there are always people that will want to shrink app windows to tiny phone sizes while they work on other things.
what do you mean "by accident?" UWP works across Windows 10 platforms by design.
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While WM was clunky at least you could run any random piece of software you wanted. Then Microsoft tried to copy apple. I think if they had put a relatively open OS and sold highend phones for $200-300 bucks I think they could have made it. They probably would have had to sink billions and billions, but they could have done it. Look at Xbox its viable platform today.
You can sideload applications in Windows 10 mobile easily enough. Like Android it's been on by default for some time and just a matter of downloading an .appx package file. The ability to sideload doesn't help if there aren't apps to sideload.
I don't think the problem was ever the openness of the platform. An open platform doesn't guarantee developers either (look at decades of people not support Linux ports of their applications as an obvious example).
The problem with sideloading is that it requires a lot of hops. So many hops nobody does this.
Usually "a hop" is represented by some required certificate, a special "container" the app needs to follow, a special API voodoo call you should make to sideload the app. It quickly decays from being a reliable reproducible computer science, and turns into the joke of marketing greed you would never trust.
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Look I don't want to beat a dead horse, but Microsoft has no one else to blame but themselves. The launch version was a great early adopter MVP and moved the entire mobile industry to a content first paradigm (flat UI). However, they never tried to catch up in the feature department. Instead they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.
So during all of those years, developers were left with those same C# MVP APIs that didn't support all the various things 3rd party companies needed. It required hiring a specialist C# engineer and spending extra time to fill in the gaps left behind. No company was going to do that with a phone barely at 10% of the market.
Microsoft should have ruthlessly focused on getting feature parity with iPhone and Android, and released updates every month. Showed the world they were serious about being a 1st-tier dominant player.
Instead, they felt lazy and slow. I think there was 18 months between one release to the next without a peep from them. That's no way to instill confidence that they were competent at their job.
> they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.
I think it’s easy for us to focus on software but I don’t think any of that mattered compared to failing so badly on the hardware side. Over that period, how many weeks were there where they had phone hardware which was competitive with Android, much less iOS? It seemed like every time I saw it mentioned the cycle was “<software feature> looks cool but the phone specs are like my old phone”.
That was one of the little gems of Windows Phone. It could do what your current generation Android/Apple phone could do on previous generation hardware.
WP hardware was dirt cheap because of it.
I remember when they tried to push the first version of Windows Phone out of the gates. I think it was 2008 or 2009. Then - as to be expected with that ambitious projects - they already had big delays. What happened then is a good example of how big companies seem to have problems taking the necessary radical steps when projects don't perform. I've experienced this at my employee. Only that the project I have in mind is more than 10 years heavily underperforming while spending easily over a billion dollars. Microsoft seemed to let the Windows Phone project keep going pretty much the same way as it started ... same project lead, probably a lot of the same people. What happens than typically is that good people don't work on this kind of projects.
Then the whole Nokia mess ... what a sad story.
I remember when I finally gave up any hope for Windows Phone: It was when I read that Samsung and HTC ought to pay license fee to Microsoft. That was probably the biggest mistake in Microsoft's history. They should have payed them 50 $ per sold Smartphone with Windows Phone on it.
Anyway - I still have a Windows Phone from my employee and like it.
As much as I loved Windows Phone (I bought 4 of them), the app development side was never mature enough to take seriously by most professionals. The support from Microsoft on the development side was pretty limited, outside of "hey, we're MS, you need to do this!"
At the time, the Metro theme seemed like a novel and interesting idea. In hindsight, mimicking the UX of iOS (which is exactly what Android did), was the correct path. Had MS made the Windows Phone look exactly like iOS, but offered an easier app dev story, there _might_ have been a chance to grow their market share.
But in reality, I doubt there is anything MS could have done to rebuild their mobile presence. Apple and Android are an unassailable juggernaut from a consumer's perspective and even I succumbed.
After buying the Nokia 1020, which was a phenomenal piece of hardware, MS started tinkering with core apps like the calendar and email. There was this fanfare of purchasing third party apps and adapting them, but this was the deal-breaker for me. These two apps (which I installed with an early beta of Windows 10 Mobile) were simply horrible. They were menu oriented. Mobile phone apps shouldn't have menus. Period. Anytime you see a hamburger menu, you're looking at pure UX laziness. When the second update came through and I saw these apps get _worse_....
...I walked out of work, walked the two blocks to the nearest AT&T store, threw the 1020 on the little round table and said, "iPhone 6plus, don't care about color or anything....and I rubber case"...
That was nearly three years ago. I recently upgraded to the 7plus and sold my 6plus for $250. I never even think about apps now. It just works.
My black Nokia 1020 with the recharging case sits in my desk. Worthless.
> My black Nokia 1020 with the recharging case sits in my desk. Worthless.
Can I have it? Since it's worthless and everything. I'll pay shipping.
Well worthless is subjective. There's some value since the camera is pretty great and it can still be used as a legit phone. And I keep tabs on if anyone has built some 3rd party tools for it to turn it into something cool.
You can pester me on LinkedIn if you want: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chidave/
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One of the biggest failures of windows mobile was constant abandonment and reset,
+ all the mobile developers and users from the pre-iphone days were simply dropped with no path to wp7,
+ the earliest and devs of wp7 were all dropped in favour of wp8,
+ MS execs then approved of a slightly less damaging strategy with 8 to Wp10 but at this time it was already too late
Microsoft could not solve the app-gap problem because the problem was caused by a lack of trust.
This. But wait, in order to further harmonize "cloud first mobile first experiences" they may be deeply pleased to announce one more important transition from UWP to OneCore.
UWP is getting new features all the time, it's the way forward for Windows apps and will stay for many years to come. Even all the default Windows 10 apps and stuff like settings UI are UWP.
OneCore is an internal Windows refactor that won't affect users nor developers.
Windows Mobile 6 (2007, CE based) was pretty good. iPhone changed everything.
Then Microsoft destroyed v6 with Windows Mobile 7 (CE based but incompatible to CE apps, Silverlight-only apps)
Windows Mobile 7 got replaced by incompatible Windows Phone 8.
Windows Mobile 8 got replaced by incompatible Windows Phone 10.
Microsoft finally admits Windows Phone/Mobile 10 is dead.
More on the "burning platform memo" of their infamous Stephen Elop, and the $7.6 billion write down on the acquisition of Nokia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Mobile
There was no Windows mobile 7. It was already branded as Windows Phone 7 by then. They went back to Windows Mobile for 10, I think.
What Microsoft did wrong: charge for the OS, and then rewrite it.
I had a Samsung Omnia 7, and it was still the best phone I've had, in the sense that the UI was fast, obvious, and well thought out.
Then they brought out Windows 8 mobile. And abandoned all hardware that ran Windows 7 mobile. And messed around with a working UI and broke the 'experience' (ghastly buzzword).
And all the while, trying to fight Android which was free, and Apple that just has a cult of users that will buy the new phone regardless.
Disclosure: I work at Microsoft, I have worked for Microsoft before and quit, and come back. I love the company, but I am no zealot (tried to standardize a company on Macs during my six years away, because it made sense). I never worked on Windows Phone, but I know the company and the tech well.
Here is where we fucked up:
1. We were, for a long time, a company, where every product/business group had to pay for its own right to exist. Everyone had their own P&L, contribution margin targets, marketing. You had to make money by yourself to stay alive. KT made sure we all understood this.
2. We had a history of "fast follower" successes - Windows, Word, Windows Server, SQL Server, Exchange, IE, even Intune nowadays, and many many others got successful not by disrupting the current market leader or by hardcore innovation, but by leveraging either an open or standard platform and always getting better, without trying to rewrite the rules of the game. OK, maybe Office rewrote them when it came out, but it was packaging.
3. Balmer (whom I love as a leader) got trolled by Apple's and Google's success, and Microsoft graduating from not really cool to quite uncool. So he decided to tackle them the way it had worked before (point 2.). Simultaneously, he tried to correct point 1, but, as radical as his 2014 reorganization to break org barriers was, he did not get rid of KT (Kevin Turner). KT brought in the money, KT defined the culture. Everyone had to keep making their own money.
We could have: Offered the mobile OS for free from day one. Given Office on Mobile for free from day one. Bought or OEMed Xamarin a lot sooner. Returned 100% of app revenue to app devs who sell through the Windows Store. Made dev tools (Studio CE) free earlier. Guaranteed no data collection (remember the Scroogled campaign…?)
All those have either been done, or are irrelevant now, while the stock is still at a record high, after we lost the game... We could have done all of the above and fare better than we have, and we have fared well.
Instead, we comp hardware sellers on MARGIN, as if it makes a bloody difference. We monetize the post install experience. All bullshit for pennies. Everyone had to make money on their own so we missed the bigger picture.
Satya fixed this, and it hurt, as it was the only way left to go. I gave up on a phone I really liked, as I saw no future.
I don't know if I should hope for us bringing new phones out, but I sure hope we never again let our Operating Mechanisms kill our ability to see the big picture and disrupt the market.
> We could have: Offered the mobile OS for free from day one. Given Office on Mobile for free from day one. Bought or OEMed Xamarin a lot sooner. [...] Made dev tools (Studio CE) free earlier.
Quoted for emphasis. It's remarkable in hindsight that Microsoft didn't try to leverage it's own already successful products with their inherent network effects, to buy market-share.
This surprises no one.
I'm more interested in: what's the future for UWP apps now? Another dead end like silverlight?
A cross platform UI library that runs on .Net core (ie. windows, mac, linux, android, ios), some kind of hybrid of ??? and Xamarin forms could potentially be quite a nice tool... but its pretty hard to be excited about the prospect with their track record of killed off UI frameworks so far.
UWP apps wouldn't be so bad for Windows if maybe Microsoft extended their functionality a little and kept improving their performance.
However, what scares me to death as a user is that if UWP is let's say super-popular with developers 5-10 years from now, and everyone builds their apps as UWP apps for Windows, then Microsoft will eventually restrict "normal" users (read: most "consumer" Windows machines) from even side-loading apps from outside of the store.
If that's something that has even crossed the minds of Microsoft's leadership, then I definitely don't want UWP to gain any sort of real traction. And I'd rather see Microsoft improve user security through instant virtualization for apps, like what they're doing with App Guard for Edge, even if it's only an option users could choose, and not something that works by default for most or all apps.
Exactly that was the original intent with Metro apps. For developers, Visual Studio was able to provision keys (online), but otherwise you had to be inside AD domain, or have the Enterprise SKU and "sideloading key".
Only with Windows 10 it became possible to sideload non-win32 apps.
Adobe XD is a fully featured professional UWP creative app, distributed outside the store
http://www.adobe.com/products/experience-design.html
I guess that will depend on Widnows Store, if that is working, even a little, I would guess UWP is safe. The fall creator's update has some nice new features -including SQL and acrylic - it will be interesting to watch adoption rates over the next year
Well the Xbox is still a UWP target, so there are still multiple platforms that use it.
Also I wouldn't be surprised if we see microsoft make a push to allow UWP to target Android.
Currently they are still pushing it as the future, with Desktop Bridge being a stepping stone to migrate Win32 apps into UWP.
I think it has a little more hope with XBOX One support.
The existence of Windows Phone was one of the more confusing efforts in the professional world. Microsoft had released an OS that, while itself was a capable OS, the ecosystem around it was unacceptable. The availability of apps was terrible, and those that were there were often not kept up to the standard that iOS and Android apps were.
Still, a lot of people bought them at work because of concerns over compatibility with Exchange or the rest of their Microsoft ecosystem. They've all slowly had to learn that Microsoft isn't as omnipresent as it once was, and have had to buy new devices and learn a new OS all over again.
Microsoft really should have killed this sooner and saved everyone the headache.
Sad news. I have a Nokia Windows 8.1 phone. Battery life is excellent for a smart phone. Build quality is great including quality of camera. Apps are the only missing feature. Sad all the expertise Nokia built up over the years has come to nought.
I'm also still using my Lumia 925 as my main phone. And despite this news I'm still thinking about buying a newer one, second hand. Every time I use android or IOS I miss tiles, pinning, the super clean settings
I was using WP since times of WP 7 and Lumia 710. At that time other options were either super costly iPhone or crappy lagging Android. WP had a fresh look, smooth OS and range of hardware from Nokia.
Unfortunately, MS fumbled couple of times with internals while moving to WP 8 and WM 10.
In the meanwhile Android fixed the kinks and improved UI. Motorola and Xiaomi improved value for money of Android.
Yeah, a $80-$100 Nokia ran as smoothly as an expensive Android at that time.
You may think it ran as smoothly, but it certainly didn't do as much.
Lumia 520 and Moto G were almost identical hardware (almost same CPU, same GPU, Moto G had double RAM and 720p display, Lumia only 800x480), for similar price, but the Moto G was way better device, that did stuff people wanted.
Pretty sure we talk about the same time nexus 3 and 4 were a thing. In that case Android was far from Laggy already. Hardware producers just still fucked everything in their software up
They've given up on being a mobile OS provider, I think, at least for now. I wonder if the announcement that they got the Win 10 kernel to compile on ARM is more geared at laptops/tablets than phones.
What I haven't seen reported is Win 6.X had a large enterprise/industrial user base that now is going to have to choose between Android and iOS. It's interesting that the size of that existing customer base is small enough, compared to the consumer market, that it's not worth Microsoft's efforts to keep the industrial mobile OS product going.
"incentivize app devs". as an early adopter I felt abandoned.
I was all in on windows mobile around v7 and windows8. bought the flagship lumia phone and surface rt tablet. invested the time to develop some basic apps. 6 months later both platforms were basically discontinued with no upgrade path, so I abandoned it too.
if microsoft had just made an enterprise successor to blackberry, instead of trying to make a consumer phone, they probably would have been more successful. once the platform had traction in enterprise, maybe they could of made the consumer jump.
Sorry you feel abandoned. However, as you say you are an early adopter you should recognize this is a strong (even likely?) possibility.
Yes, if the platform you invest in early is a success you can reap many rewards. But the mobile OS market has killed many platforms, and even a successful company like Microsoft can't guarantee success.
We can play what-ifs in hindsight, but it's not like Microsoft was late to the game. I remember Windows CE and Pocket PC. My guess (and hope) is for Microsoft to make an Android phone. They just announced a launcher, so fingers crossed!
MS really doesn't understand why people don't like their products. And that's a bit bonkers. People get paid lots of money to think about that problem everyday, and they still can't figure it out.
Nobody trusts you. They don't trust your vision. They don't trust your commitment. They don't trust your ability. They don't trust your execution. And they don't trust your intentions.
no one trusts Microsoft. Well maybe some people do, but how's that working out for you?
Where does this leave Windows Universal Development? Hardly Universal if it’s only for Windows 10 desktop. I’m no Windows nor Xbox user, but do people develop using Universal for both? Are there other platforms right now worth targeting for Windows Universal?
There's still HoloLens, Surface Hub, XBox, and IoT Core and Enterprise.
My employer writes UWP apps for itself, because we have all of these devices (even XBox) and write UWP apps for them all (because with the exception of IoT Enterprise, they're all UWP-only.)
IoT Mobile is still a SKU that Microsoft sell, by the way. Guess what IoT Mobile is? It's Windows Mobile.
It isn't dead, it's just not getting new features. It'll be replaced by OneCore in the not too distant future, I imagine.
UWP is getting new features all the time, it's the way forward for Windows apps and will stay for many years to come. Even all the default Windows 10 apps and stuff like settings UI are UWP.
OneCore is an internal Windows refactor that won't affect users nor developers.
I think a big question now is will Microsoft build a smartphone product on top of Android? This will help them capture existing app ecosystem and enable them to provide "the best of Microsoft" for enterprise mobile customers. The cloud market is so important and it just seems strategically weak to not have a phone platform to connect with that. Google Cloud has Google Play Services and there is lots of opportunity there.
What Google has done with iOS and even Android (particularly with Samsung's play to break dependency on Google) might be where MS is heading. Google has decoupled their apps/services from the OS, and provided a consistent 'Google-y' UX (or working towards that anyway) across all of the platforms. MS seems to be in the way there, with Edge being released for both mobile platforms.
This makes me really sad given Windows 10 Mobile had a desktop mode, Continuum, and Microsoft had x86-on-ARM emulation in development for Windows 10 laptops.
Why they never put 2 and 2 together is beyond me.
> Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
Who didn't?
Seriously, nobody actually expected it to win over either iOS or Android.
I actually really like windows 10 mobile, but as a developer my attention span is limited and the market just wasn't there.
That said, I think if they announced convergence on all devices, released some really nice hardware (surface phone anybody?), and marketed convergence as the Next Big Thing, they could have made some serious in-roads in market share.
"Your all-in-one wonder device is ready!"
Wow. This is sad. Not surprising though.
I'm disappointed that we're now stick with a mediocre duopoly of OSs now.
Windows Phone had potential. All MS needed to do was to show some real commitment to it by keeping APIs relatively stable and not impose any onerous requirements.
APIs were never stable for very long and all the weird UI decisions they tried to force down peoples throats really backfired. The marketing hype around universal apps backfired too - the developer APIs were not at all aligned with the marketing vision.
Truthfully, I think Microsoft is adjusting to being a corporation without a monopoly. That's what it comes down to - away from the desktop users had more attractive options (iOS/Android) and even on the desktop users just avoided upgrading (I skipped both Vista and Windows 8) while others have totally ditched desktops altogether.
Bye bye WiMo.
So that's Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft that failed with phones.
I think it's safe to say we will never see a viable third option in mobile.
Might as well start thinking of the next great paradigm shift but even there it's hard to see anyone out maneuvering Apple and Google.
Those are like the poster children of tech industry network effects. Apple was first, Google decoupled the OS from the hardware, and Windows came in two years after Google without the goodwill Google has. Amazon and Facebook are the same story. Too late, not hip enough to catch on with the cool kids.
Both Amazon's and Facebook's attempts were modifications atop Android. You could throw Samsung's skinned Android into the same comparison and call it a success.
It's a shame but it's not surprising. I loved my Lumia Icon way back, but even then the lack of apps from all but the biggest players was eventually a dealbreaker. I went to iPhone personally, I like the similar build quality and the heft to the devices is nice.
Honestly I'll never understand why MS even went into the mobile space, what with having two enormous and well entrenched competitors (not that I'm saying only having two is a good thing overall, but you know) and coming into the game so very, very late compared to them. Windows Phone was doomed from the start I think, just by market forces, not even going into the faults with the product itself.
Microsoft was already on the mobile space before Apple or Google even thought about writing a mobile OS.
They just failed to properly capitalize on that.
In Europe we only had Symbian and Windows CE handsets to choose from.
Does anyone actually make money on the app Store? Either Desktop or Mobile?
I have a niche desktop app that I'm thinking about porting. It's probably a few weeks worth of work. The 30% cut might be tolerable if I can increase the sales.
Am I shadowbanned? I can't see my comment from another account.
I can see both your comments.
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I still remember one of the first HTC phones which had a mobile version of I think windows xp. The phone came with a stylus and the windows felt like a miniaturized version of desktop. This improved significantly in the Lumia series, the UI was good and easy to use. But by then the app ecosystem had already built strongly around android and ios so there was not much traction. I feel microsoft lost the ecosystem battle rather than OS. With too big app stores, the developers did not have much appetite for supporting another ecosystem which was very small.
What?
Windows CE is older than Android.
It feels inevitable, but it's still a shame.
I think the Windows Mobile interface was the most functional of the mobile UIs. I switched to Android years ago, but I still miss it.
After my dad had a stroke, he needed a new phone that he could use easily. We ended up with a Nokia using Windows Phone because the large tiles and keyboard buttons were something he could handle. The iOS and Android interfaces required more precision than he was able to do.
To be fair, this was 5 or so years ago and I didn't delve very far into accessibility settings for anything. WP worked fine out of the box, though.
It should also be noted that W10 Mobile was a slow running, bug ridden mess when it was released and took well over a year to become usable. It was also not compatible with most of the existing Windows Phone handsets in use, and at the same time, Microsoft killed off their phone hardware (nothing released since 2015) and pulled them out of stores. So anywhere that Windows phones were gaining traction in were guaranteed to be short lived.
It was already too late that MS embrace opensource and made their IDE(Visual Studio) for free. Developers who can't afford it already moved on and used free and opensource alternatives and then start to love it without looking back at MS stuff. They then realize that MS technologies are not the only cool tools and programming languages to write applications with and make money.
Joe Belfiore wholly missed the problem. Microsoft didn't need apps. Most people using Windows Mobile had enough apps. But the last Verizon phone which could run Windows came out three years ago. People left Windows because they didn't have any options. Had Microsoft kept Nokia intact, even in a reduced size state, Windows Mobile would probably still have it's 5% or so market share.
Sad. I used to a have a Nokia 1520 and it was a great phone. However, there were a few things that eventually just made me switch to an iPhone.
I could have told them almost a decade ago that the whole Microsoft mobile/phone thing was doomed from the very start. It's amazing to me that it was so obvious to me then, and yet the smartest highest-paid people at Microsoft couldn't figure it out. Unbelievable.
The webview in Windows Phone was I think Internet Explorer 10 or something like that. Thus we were unable to port our Sencha Touch 1.1.1 app to Windows Phone.
Then we have tried to rewrite the app with Sencha Touch 2 but because it was time consuming my employer told me to work on other things.
If you supported Edge or IE for Windows 10 Desktop then it would of supported the mobile version since both use the same platform. So you are still going to have to support this OS if you are targeting Windows for desktop and tablets.
This reminds me of https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U (Ballmer Laughs at iPhone)
That's heartbreaking, they are two minutes away from singularity -a usable os that works on mobile, tablet and desktop.
It's stupid to stop now, they managed to take on the iPad with surface, I'm sure a mobile success is possible.
That's too bad.
I had an old HP Ipaq running Win CE back years before Apple did their first iPhone.
Microsoft was first, and it worked pretty well. Another case of MS getting into things too soon, and somehow missing the boat again as time moves by.
I loved the look of the tiles... but outside of that I never really understood the value proposition.
It's great to have more competitors but did they ever really shoot for 1 key differentiation that would make people switch?
Not something I'll regret about. I'm looking forward to Librem 5 running Plasma Mobile with native Wayland and baseband separated from the CPU (they've just succeeded in crowdfunding).
It's a shame, I had a win7 device and it had some great ideas, they had the groundwork laid for a solid platform... But from what I've heard, it didn't get better as it progressed.
I still don't understand why they killed MSN Messenger. Everyone I knew, we used messenger to communicate. Now we use WhatsApp or something else.
It was the door to do all they can't do now.
It has been a slow death for Windows Mobile. To think that my very first smartphone was an HP Windows phone way before we even imagined that there will be something called Android.
If Microsoft can't make things happen, I am not sure who can ! They have money, influence, power and user base with personal computers and cloud, and still they failed !
I used a Nokia Lumia with Windows Phone 8. People say that the UI was better than Android or iOS, but I disagree.
The flat UI of Windows Phone was completely unintuitive. In the real world it's many times easy to distinguish objects you can interact with, by shape, texture or touch. With feature phones or remote controls you had hardware buttons.
With PC monitors and touch screens all controls are virtual, you get no 3D or touch feedback, so you have to rely on visual clues and visual patterns.
The flat UI of Windows Phone was pretty bad, providing no visual clues whatsoever, so you where left to touch text randomly on the screen, in the hope that some of it will click.
I see people here giving examples of technically illiterate wives and grandparents successfully using the Windows Phone, but guys, you're kind of missing the forest from the trees.
It's not that hard to learn how to make a phone call, or write an SMS, given that it's an operation that you're doing every couple of hours. You simply have to learn the path from home screen to whatever you want to do. Ask any child and he'll tell you that this is best done by trial and error and it is never a problem for repetitive operations, because we've got good memories.
The problems happens when you interact with an application UI that you've never seen before. And to be honest, even though I've been primarily an iOS user for the past 3 years, the best of the bunch in this regard is Android.
By comparison Android's material design provides intelligent clues about what can be pressed, or about what interaction just happened. And the design of Android applications is pretty flat, in the sense that available options are clearly laid out in front of you, no need to guess or to trigger hidden menus.
My favorite example was RunKeeper for iOS versus Android. The Android version had clear action buttons for starting a race, allowing me to easily select the type, whereas the iOS interface had the options hidden behind a menu that would appear when I tapped on the logo, which was a pretty dumb idea. I'm not even going to mention the dedicated Back button of Android, because people that don't have an Android just don't get it.
But back to Windows Phone, I don't know what you folks have been smoking, but it had terrible UI. And the apps where horrible. Its only saving grace where those Nokia Lumia phones that had a good quality/price ratio, but Android was already dominating the cheap smartphone market and a cheap Android might have been worse, but at least it had apps.
The weird thing is that Win Phone 8 (ish) was pretty nice with great animations, and nice fit and finish, then they seemed to throw all that away in later versions.
Android released couple of months after the iPhone. Windows Phone couple of years later. This is it. Microsoft could have easily been the leading mobile platform.
Microsoft was the leading mobile platform. They even had apps, real apps, desktop-caliber (for the time) apps. 10 years before the iPhone.
Microsoft had the lead for a while and they got disrupted by a shinier, more consumer-friendly device. Their mistake was thinking that consumers didn't want a smartphone and aiming it at an enterprise market, like Blackberry. That "mistake" made them possibly billions of dollars over its life.
Apple took a huge risk going in the opposite direction. It's easy to look back and realize Microsoft gave up a huge market segment, but at the time things were going well for them. Their only competitor back then (Palm) bet the company on trying to make the transition to compete with Apple and... well. We all know what happened there.
This is really sad. They shouldn't have given up so early. They could have improved a lot. People still trust Microsoft even with mobile phones.
If I was Microsoft I'd work on something like a browser based mobile OS like Firefox OS. Firefox OS failed but that was before ES6 and asmjs.
MS need to create a windows phone that runs Android + Windows apps + can be turned on a full Windows Desktop running on ARM when docked up.
What if Microsoft open sourced it? Maybe with the understanding that the default search engine would be Bing and browser edge?
Great. But the "unified UI" lead to touchscreens which are now a staple on laptops and they won't go away alas :(
if I was Microsoft's CEO, I would have donated $ billions to Mozilla. Then let Mozilla to build the best mobile browser. The Web can easily abstract the OS. As WeChat has shown. That way I can sell more handsets and also bespoke "Microsoft Services" based on the web.
Microsoft, please invest instead in https://puri.sm/posts/librem5-roadmap-to-imx8/
so that you cut into your competitors cash cows, even if you don't have a profit. Just like Google did to you with Google Docs, cutting into MS Office.
This way, you'd at least have a voice on mobile, instead of fully out.
On what hardware platform does Microsoft earn money on? Xbox and keyboards?
Will Microsoft go back to a pure software maker?
With the right strategy, making money is not essential. Like Google with the Nexus a few years ago, MS needs only to build reference hardware to keep OEMs on the straight and narrow, then collect elsewhere (with preinstalled services or OS that OEMs end up distributing).
The problem is that "elsewhere" is currently occupied by Google (in terms of ubiquity) and Apple (in terms of profit), so MS has been pushed into the uncomfortable role of luxury OEM, and there is no major money there regardless of whether you make phones or laptops.
Surface
Not sure if Microsoft has earned back it's investment on the Surface line yet. First years it was a big loss, then it has started to earn money, but it has started falling again.
Compared to Xbox, Surface revenue is about a 25% of Xbox.
Of total earnings Surface is about 3%.
I honestly thought they did pretty bad trying to enter the market. It was already flooded.
That was kind of obvious a year or two ago when Microsoft gutted 99% of the Nokia division.
Isn't there a Surface Phone in the works? I've heard lots of rumours about it.
Does this mean that Groove Music will go the way of Zune and PlaysForSure?
It already did. They are shutting down the streaming service.
Microsoft is not part of the music ecosystem.
("PlaysForSure is not part of the Zune ecosystem" - Microsoft flack, 2006)
In 2009, when announcing Windows Mobile 6.5, Microsoft launched the Windows Marketplace, a tentative to catch up with the App Store Gold rush. We were a french Windows Mobile game company back then, so we decided to submit our games to the Windows Marketplace. The process was really not smooth, on the technical side, on the "marketing" side and the process side.
On the technical side, the apps submission was crippled with bugs, with cryptic messages that we couldn't figure. A lot of developers were having the same troubles and we painfully figured out what were the problems while searching Microsoft forums. It gave me a really bad impression, and I remembered not being impressed at all. We were also in the process of submitting our first app to the iOS App Store and comparing the two experiences was not good for Microsoft, even with the complexity of certificates/signatures of the App Store.
On the marketing side, the entry price for submitting 5 apps to the Marketplace was $99. Then, you had to pay $10 for each new app, or for a new localised version of your app (you had to create a new entry for each localised version). Once again, on the iOS store, you just had to pay $99/year for a developper certificate and then you could submit any number of apps/version you want. I didn't understand back then why Microsoft had chosen theses rules: they just had to copy a successful model from their competitor. We did what almost all developers did at this time : we paid $99, submitted 5 apps and waited to see how successful was the Marketplace.
Our game, a puzzle game called Meon, began to be downloaded a lot. We saw purchases going up in the Marketplace vendor interface. We were super happy, but there was a problem. We couldn't figure how to fill the paiement account. All instructions seemed to be written for a US developper : you had to provide a proof of identity signed by a notary, you had to fill a W8-BEN form etc... We kept trying to submit our W8-BEN form but kept receiving email about our W8-BEN that told-us something was bad with it. For 6 months, we couldn't fill our paiement information, while we saw the royalties climbed up. At the same time, Microsoft launched the "Race to Market Challenge" to boost the Marketplace and motivate developer to submit apps. Ironically, we won the race in the 'Most Downloaded Free Application' (and accessory a really really big Microsoft Surface Table). As winner, we were invited in August in Seattle, among other developers, to attend to a private presentation of what will be the next Microsoft platform, Windows Phone 7. It was really cool from Microsoft to invite us, a small game company (3 persons) among big name like Bank of America. In the Microsoft office, I managed to explain our payment problem to one of the presenter, he sent a mail and few days later, our payment information was validated and we finally got our money.
What I learned then was to not trust Microsoft when you’re a small developer : if I hadn't been able to contact a Microsoft manager in person, I wouldn't be able to get my money. The whole process was not ready, and not in the same league of the growing App Store. As a 3 developers company, we prioritised to work on iOS and Android. Microsoft sent us Lumia phone to develop apps for Windows 7: It was too late, you never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Technically was good perhaps even better platform than iOS and Android.
To Late To Market
The lack of a Youtube App from Google killed the Windows Phone. https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/microsoft_on_the_issues/
definitely helped. MS put a lot of effort into building a slick YouTube app and Google changed the T&Cs the week after it launched or something. Basically issued a takedown of the MS app because it didn't conform to the new standard they'd just introduced. I believe it was that third party apps had to allow ads, even though the iOS and Android apps did not.
Naw, you have it all wrong. They reversed engineered the YouTube API's and then suppressed YouTube ads. They deserved what they got for doing something that stupid and not thinking Google wouldn't find out.
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MS has gotten really good with hardware off late. Why not a Surface phone with Stock android and regular updates? If it works out, gives MS a platform to try different services like Samsung with bixby etc.
Microsoft is a joke, and not even a good one.
Windows phone didnt fail because of Microsofts efforts, it failed because of other companies efforts.
Let me name some of them: Instagram (fb), facebook, Snapchat.
Especially the last one has an agenda.
It was just a matter of time.
This is very disappointing. Apple and Google needed the competition.
Url changed to this (via http://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-mobile-microsoft-jus..., a slightly less substantive article.
At least they did it with a tweet. It's a sign of respect, right?
https://www.richestpeopleonearth.com/
I wonder what that guy has done to get and keep such an elite tech job, complete with year-long vacations, and doesn't even have to 'pretend' to use his own products.
If you supported Edge or IE for Windows 10 Desktop then it would of supported the mobile version since both use the same platform. So you are still going to have to support this OS if you are targeting Windows for desktop and tablets.
LOOK AT THIS. https://www.richestpeopleonearth.com/
Oh boy, Nokia's gonna be pissed!
>Microsoft has told its die-hard Windows 10 Mobile fans
All 5 of them?
It's at least 5X larger than that. ;)
There are literally dozens of us.
Well Windows phone was just different. And being different does not always mean being the best. Windows on mobile should have been more modular when it came to looks. Enforcing tiles on mobile when people were used to traditional icons on screen was a terrible decision. I am not going to write about the other issues like incompatibilities , lack of apps and other chicken and egg problems.
You can experiment when you have the user base and even then you need to be super careful.