Comment by hitekker
8 years ago
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.
8 years ago
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.
> Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.
Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).
10 replies →
I assume the iphone was "more fancy featurephone" due to the lack of 3rd party apps?
I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on.
It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.
2 replies →