Comment by r00fus
8 years ago
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.