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Comment by burnte

8 years ago

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.

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burnte

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digi_owl  8 years ago

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.

  • smitherfield  8 years ago

    > 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).

  • chungy  8 years ago

    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.

    • pedasmith  8 years ago

      I worked for a company in 2006 that was considering writing phone apps (we already had a bunch of Windows apps). At the time, each phone company wanted to "curate" the apps for their own phone stores. At least one company wanted, for each $10 app, about $11 of revenue. The result: we decided that it would be essentially impossible to ever make money from phone apps.

      What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people.

      [disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]

    • xorcist  8 years ago

      Don't confuse the lack of modern mobile apps with any mobile apps. There was a thriving ecosystem around mobile apps at the time. Not only Windows Mobile and Blackberry but Symbian too, which I believe was the largest, and Treo.

      There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it.

      That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.