Comment by gwbas1c
8 years ago
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.
I think that's underplaying Windows Mobile a little bit. Did Blackberry or Palm do any better? All of them came out around the same time and shared roughly the same success. Yes the smartphone market was far smaller, but technology was far inferior compared to the Android/iOS era. It's like wondering why the home PC market was so small before the Windows era began: technology hadn't caught up yet. That doesn't mean you should discount DOS, Amiga, Atari, Commodore, or early Apple efforts. They were successful in their own right, and without them we wouldn't have modern PCs. Likewise without Blackberry, Palm/Handspring Treo, and Windows Mobile, we would never have had the iPhone.
It's also worth remember the Apple Newton if you ever start to question the mobile technology decisions of Microsoft or wonder how Apple would have fared if they chose to compete then. They tried. They failed.