Comment by michaelbuckbee
8 years ago
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".
Just a reminder: the "smartphone market" was a pitifully small creature when compared to the behemoth that iOS and Android service today... I wonder why that is?
It's a painful reminder that Microsoft doesn't do "blue ocean" strategies very well. They need someone to compete against and dominate over and coopt the marketshare.
All their successes involve "parleying" a beachhead on someone else's turf (VisiCalc/Lotus123 -> MS Excel) into dominance or buying outright the dev team (Delphi -> VB 4/5/Studio).
Microsoft wanted to "evolve" the PC into a mobile device, but they could never create something from scratch that didn't smell like Windows.
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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.
Because not having Play Store != not running Android apps. People's games and other apps still need Android to run. A non-Android Wechat phone would fail for the same reason Windows phones did -- no apps.
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Maybe because it's too risky.
Alibaba wants to do that once, they made a phone[0] (in Chinese) and a operating system called YunOS[1] which forked on Android.
However, that phone was not a success. So eventually they cooperated with phone manufacturers in China to build phones that have YunOS pre-installed rather than build a phone on their own.
After seeing sale counter of those phones[3] (Also in Chinese) though, I don't think they had a lots of fans.
[0] https://baike.baidu.com/item/%E9%98%BF%E9%87%8C%E4%BA%91%E6%... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yun_OS [2] https://yunos.tmall.com/p/rd169008.htm
I think google play is a available, just nothing else is. Anyways, there are plenty of alternatives.
https://www.quora.com/How-does-Google-Play-in-China-function
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.
Both Tizen and Jolla are still around, though.
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You're still missing:
- Palm/HP webOS
- Intel Moblin
- Samsung Bada
webOS still had a chance when HP's CEO churn killed it. It's UI is still better than modern Android or iOS. All it needed was a single generation of decent hardware.
Moblin was merged with Nokia's Maemo into Meego. Meego was a resounding success on the one phone it shipped (Nokia N9 sold millions of devices in non-primary markets with zero advertising). We can thank Elop the Trojan CEO for that one.
Meego morphed into Tizen which Samsung promised not to change too much before proceeding to basically replace the entire UI stack with Bada. Tizen offers nothing but a rip-off Android experience and an SDK with a EULA that screws devs so bad that even MS or Apple wouldn't dream of having it (last time I checked, if you write something with the proprietary Tizen SDK, you hand all your rights to your code over to Samsung).
- 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.
> 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/
I remember Facebook home, but it was more an attempt to colonise Android (like Microsoft is trying now) than a Blackberry, Jolla, Tizen etc offering.
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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).