Comment by nathantotten
8 years ago
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.
I was a student who had won a Lumia 800 around May of 2012. There was a promotion where anyone who submitted 4 apps to the appstore would get a phone - no 'win' involved, a guaranteed phone. It was one of the best promotions I'd ever seen, and I promptly churned out 4 soundboard apps in a week.
This is unfortunately true, but it isn't representative of the entire effort put forth to acquire apps. I was part of the Microsoft org who was doing this at the time. We were split between breadth engagements (one to many like at universities or hackathons) and depth engagements (one to one). I was working depth engagements helping established companies port existing iOS and Android apps to Windows. The amount of investment from Microsoft in those depth engagements ranged from me helping out with technical barriers for a couple days to hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives and development effort. It was all about how desirable that name or brand was on other platforms.
Did everything they could...
Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s
It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.
Hey, if you're optimizing for "number of apps on our store" I bet it worked great!
Why spend $100,000 developing something one app when you could get 1000 for the same price?!
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They tried that too. The Verge reported in 2013 that Microsoft was paying some developers $100,000 each to port their apps to Windows Mobile. The article hints that was how Pandora & Temple Run ended up on Windows Mobile.
https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...
That certainly wasn't the only program. MSFT paid cost for my mobile dev company to port games, because we had an established brand on iOS/Android. $100 for whatever random college students come up with seems very reasonable.
That's probably where those ads on Craigslist coding gigs come from.
"I'll pay you $100 or split the equity for my cool new app idea!"
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.
It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone, and the guys at Android said, "Oh shit." Meanwhile Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never succeed. Ballmer drove MS into the ground. Everyone pivoted to the iPhone model except MS, who spit out WinMo 6.5 in 2009, and finally WinMo 7 in 2010. By 2010, the race was pretty much over. The rest of what MS did was half-assed at best.
You're 100% right, MS beat MS.
And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5.
Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform.
Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.
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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.
Rudy Hyn
That’s the one
>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?
You have to consider this in the context at the time. Yes it would have been expensive, but Microsoft was investing BILLIONS into Windows Phone. Microsoft and partners spent something like $700 million dollars just on marketing for the launch of Windows Phone 7[1,2].
To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done this for only one app. I am saying they should have done this for many apps. If they had created quality versions of, say, the top 25 apps for mobile at the time they would have been in a much better position. I believe they could have made significant traction with business users. Remember, at the time Office wasn't available on other platforms and was (is) a huge draw for many people.
If they had been successful with the strategy and gained market share the partners would have wanted to take over their own apps anyway to enable monetization. But they needed users for that and to get users they needed apps. You have to jump start it somehow.
Now, would it have made any difference? Who knows. But IMO, you either need to not do it or you need to do all parts of it right. You can't go half way on the ecosystem and expect to succeed in an already challenging market.
1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...
Sounds like a Hollywood strategy to me. Overadvertise a stinker to try to recoup your investment.
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They did manage to get many of the top 50 apps to their platform, however, top 50 isn't enough. When all your friends have the latest and greatest on their iOS and Android and you have to wait a year or two for a WP port you get tired of that. Plus there are many industry-specific and workplace apps that never made it to WP. You can only face so many let downs in the app store before you give up on a platform. Nokia did make some damn good hardware though.
> the top 25 apps for mobile at the time
This list keeps changing every month. Remember Pokemon Go?
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For a small number of core apps. If they have invested heavily and put their best engineers to work on high quality core apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Messenger etc (maybe it would be 15-20 apps 90% of people install on their phones), they would have had a much better shot at gaining momentum.
Other smaller apps would have followed and been made by independent developers but you need to cover the apps almost everybody is using and make them comparable feature and quality/performance wise to iOS and Android versions.
Number one thing most people do on their new phone is download Facebook/Messenger/Twitter. If those apps suck they will immediately have a very bad impression and will switch back to iOS or Android as soon as they get a chance.
This was the strategy that Apple followed when OS X first came out.
Third party developers were moving slowly (or not at all) so Apple started developing and giving away (or selling) apps that showed off what you could do with the new platform.
They developed Safari when Microsoft lost interest in further development of Internet Explorer. The iLife suite had iTunes, iCal, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb and GarageBand. The iWork suite had Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. They created (or bought) professional apps like Logic Pro, Final Cut, Shake, Motion and Aperture.
If you have a new platform and third party developers don't step up, then you need to start filling those holes yourself in a way that shows off your platform's advantages, and keep at it.
On the other hand, if all WP has is half-baked clones of better apps on Android/iOS, there's even less incentive to switch over.
If they were serious about growing the user base and building these apps internally was their only course of action (seems like it was) then it should have been taking more seriously (assuming parent is spot on here, I have no idea really.)
Not just one app. They would need Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and a number of other staple apps.
Usage numbers for FB are not that far behind IE. Perhaps they should have invested a proportional amount.
Intead they staffed their quality dev team on the Windows Mail app and Skype...