Comment by jarjoura
8 years ago
Look I don't want to beat a dead horse, but Microsoft has no one else to blame but themselves. The launch version was a great early adopter MVP and moved the entire mobile industry to a content first paradigm (flat UI). However, they never tried to catch up in the feature department. Instead they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.
So during all of those years, developers were left with those same C# MVP APIs that didn't support all the various things 3rd party companies needed. It required hiring a specialist C# engineer and spending extra time to fill in the gaps left behind. No company was going to do that with a phone barely at 10% of the market.
Microsoft should have ruthlessly focused on getting feature parity with iPhone and Android, and released updates every month. Showed the world they were serious about being a 1st-tier dominant player.
Instead, they felt lazy and slow. I think there was 18 months between one release to the next without a peep from them. That's no way to instill confidence that they were competent at their job.
> they focused on all the wrong things, like porting to NT kernel and building an OS that could support limited memory.
I think it’s easy for us to focus on software but I don’t think any of that mattered compared to failing so badly on the hardware side. Over that period, how many weeks were there where they had phone hardware which was competitive with Android, much less iOS? It seemed like every time I saw it mentioned the cycle was “<software feature> looks cool but the phone specs are like my old phone”.
That was one of the little gems of Windows Phone. It could do what your current generation Android/Apple phone could do on previous generation hardware.
WP hardware was dirt cheap because of it.