Nadella, Gates, and Ballmer have all admitted to Microsoft’s mobile mistakes.
He finally admitted to it. I was a Windows Phone user until the end. It’s sad that it was discontinued.
I was about to buy my first one when they discontinued them, they looked pretty dope!
deleted by creator
I had one of them, a Nokia one. They we’re not.
De-Googled android is what you want.
You can consider me conspiracy theorist, but for me the whole story about WP/Nokia was to destroy the biggest non US tech giant, so the remaining are all US based. No one are now even close.
You ever hear of this one Small startup called Samsung?
They’ve tried to build their own platform multiple times (Tizen the latest one), but they’re still always stuck using Android.
They make a ton of money with their phones and making hardware that goes into the other phones, but that’s nothing compared to taking a 30% cut of every digital sale on mobile.
Samsung?
deleted by creator
It’s never too late for another try, when you got a few billion dollars burning a hole in your pocket. There is a market for it, if done right.
They’d have to have a significant USP, they’d be competing with 2 extremely mature OSs
Android Subsystem for Windows
Now do win 10/11
Because you are nostalgic for win 8 with its full screen start menu?
You say that like 7 never existed.
I had a Windows phone for years and loved it. But I’m glad it went the way of the dinosaur because it forced me to get a pixel which is even better.
pixel which is even better.
My dude that’s downgrade lol
It’s really was.
Mistake for them but good for consumers. We all need more competition in this industry
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is the third chief executive of the software giant to admit the company has made some serious mobile mistakes.
Satya Nadella took over from former CEO Steve Ballmer in 2014 and, just over a year later, wrote off $7.6 billion related to Microsoft’s acquisition of the Nokia phone business.
Asked about a strategic mistake or wrong decision that he might regret, Nadella responds:
Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer was also slow to respond to Android and the iPhone threat, focusing the company’s efforts on Windows Mobile while famously laughing at the iPhone, calling it the “most expensive phone in the world and it doesn’t appeal to business customers because it doesn’t have a keyboard.”
“I regret there was a period in the early 2000s when we were so focused on what we had to do around Windows [Vista] that we weren’t able to redeploy talent to the new device called the phone,” explained Ballmer.
The company is constantly updating its Phone Link app to link Android and even iPhone handsets to Windows, and Microsoft has a close relationship with Samsung to ensure its mobile Office apps are preinstalled on Samsung’s Android handsets.
The original article contains 378 words, the summary contains 196 words. Saved 48%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
As long as they don’t make another windows 8 style issue I don’t see the issue of extra phone competition.
In retrospect, I think there could have been ways we could have made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones.
I’m sorry but no, Microsoft was never going to be capable of reinventing any category of computing. They’ve never done it before and it’s just not within their expertise. I think Nadella was right at the time to cut their losses. Windows Phone represented Microsoft’s best efforts in that space and, while it had its fans, it just wasn’t enough.
Meanwhile, they’ve done really well with their “apps and services on every platform” approach. How many millions of people use Outlook on their phone? How many apps are running their back end on Azure? Microsoft may have given up on an aspect of “mobile,” but is still raking in piles of cash from what people actually do on mobile devices. Take the win where you can find it.
They definitely did with Surface. They stumbled for a bit but the Pro 3 - 4 made 2-in-1 laptops actually good.
Microsoft made a decent touchscreen Windows laptop, but that’s a niche within a shrinking market. I don’t think they did much to reinvent the category. It’s better, but it’s not a fundamentally different product than what was for sale 20 years ago.
The windows phone was not out for very long. It is unknown if it would have succeed, but at the time Android was an also ran as well, and non-smart phones still dominated. Blackberry was still a major player to beat at the time. Windows if they stuck with it might have done reasonably well. It would never have become a monopoly, but we cannot know how well it would have done.
What year was Android an also-ran?
2013: 51.8% Android, 40.6% iOS, 3.8% Blackberry, 3.3% Microsoft
I think it’s a safe prediction considering the number of large manufacturers that have gone under between then and now leaving us with just the Galaxy, IPhone, and Pixel outside of remaining ‘boutique’ manufacturers that don’t really sell any volume.
Outside of the US there are other manufacturers that are thriving.
To be fair, Windows Mobile had been out for many years. The very first convergence phone I ever used was a Windows Mobile phone, iPaq 6315 or something like that, a solid 2 years before the first iPhone came out. Still used a stylus, but it was showing us what the future was.
A lot of businesses use windows as their main OS for people to use, MS could have used that skew to get a foot in the door with the windows phone. It would have been incredibly helpful and convenient for those business folks / office workers to be able to use all their windows stuff on their phone seemlessly.
TBH i feel that door hasn’t closed yet if they made a real category breaking new entry like a dedicated business phone that was like windows but on your phone.
Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work. Apple, meanwhile, licensed Microsoft Exchange for iPhone and basically established Microsoft’s entire product strategy under Nadella: providing high-margin services on whatever device people actually want to use.
Microsoft already was trying to leverage the popularity of Windows to make Windows Phone more popular but it didn’t work.
good point, i had no idea
Especially with Microsoft Teams. Teams is such a powerful application for businesses. It’s a pain in the ass to use on my work iPhone. ID love to have MS Phone again. They were well built and I never had any software or battery issues.
My first smart phone was a windows phone
I had one back in the day. I loved it honestly and was surprised they gave up.
HTC TyTN II. Loved that thing. Used to pay Age of Empires on it.
Same, a Nokia Lumia 710. Lack of app support is what killed them. Even mainstream apps you had to have a third party version, Facebook, Insta, etc.
Man nokia used to make great phones.
Man Nokia used to make great
phoneslethal weaponsSo did Samsung
One more reason I could never trust Microsoft again. They bought Nokia and ruined them.
Which wouldn’t have necessarily been a death knell, except by the point Microsoft had gotten their eggs into the Windows Phone basket, major platforms had already started shutting down functionality that could be accessed through third party applications so the App Store/Play Store official versions were the clearly superior ways to use the platforms.
In many cases, like with reddit even, third party applications are how many people have preferred to access these platforms, so long as the platform doesn’t lock down the API to kneecap them.
deleted by creator
Mine was too sort of. It was windows mobile 6 HTC shadow. This was before android and around the time iPhone was released.
Unless we’re counting the sidekick 2 as a smart phone, in which case that was my first.
deleted by creator
I think they can still reboot with an Android base. They can just do what they did for edge. Pull a Google. Sell hardware with very polished software. Android would give them full access to all Android apps. Also they already have outlook and office apps made for android.
I don’t think there is all that much money in handsets, which is why every phone company does their own weird version of Android to try to get advertising revenue on the back end.
That is correct. The money is made on the searches. With their own phones, they can push their own search engine and Ads. Google did it so they could force other makers to standardize. Microsoft can do the same thing. You make money the store. Android just makes it easy to port apps to Microsoft’s app store Developers won’t be required to code a new app just for Microsoft.
deleted by creator
I feel like the steam deck proves that we aren’t really all that far from a feasible mobile linux device. Its like 90% of what a phone OS would need to be. I’d buy a Steam Phone from Valve. Imagine an accessory with controllers, access to the whole steam store, and the ability to dock to a TV or monitor. I think that could actually work, especially since so many games are already compatible with the deck as it is.
microsoft does have a launcher for android. I’ve heard good things about it, but haven’t used it myself so can’t confirm
Honestly I would rather see a large company like Microsoft build their own OS from the ground up. Without play services you wouldn’t be able to use a lot of play store apps even if you installed the apk file. I think Google provides a lot of baked in services to developers to lock their apps into the google ecosystem. Microsoft wouldn’t really add anything of value to android in my opinion, we already have one big company looking over our shoulder, I don’t think we need a second. I think the Amazon Fire phone proves that even with a lot of money to burn it’s hard to break into google’s market.
Microsoft making their own platform that is not UNIX-like would probably get a lot more interest than just modifying android.
They are going to have the same problem they had with their original phones. No apps. They could never get enough developers to care about the OS without a user base. You also can’t get a user base without apps. That’s what killed the windows phone.
Amazon tried to use the kindle formula on a cell phone. The problem is that the main reason the kindle was successful was there was no real competition. They also only need to provide books not apps for the kindle. The cellphone market was a lot more mature with a ton of options. They came in with a mediocre phone that had less apps and less configurability. They tried to do the Apple walled garden on an Android phone. Clearly they didn’t understand their market.
Android open source bits are fine and all, but a lot of apps require Google Play Services which is not open or free.
Google Play Services has some quite strict requirements to adhere to in order for Google to licence that to you.
This includes have certain Google apps preinstalled on the device. Including Chrome.
I also doubt Microsoft would be happy with Google having the ability to cut them off whenever they damn well please.
There are a ton of phones in China running Android without google services . If you try to cut off Microsoft you would also be hurting all those Chinese phones. Google also can’t do that without being sued by Microsoft for not allowing competition.
Well, the idea behind FOSS is that you can share the common stuff and build your own stuff on top and while doing so improving the common stuff, testing uncommon usecases and adding features.
Personally I would love to have another bigger company working on Android next to Google, because that means they would (hopefully) implement their own “google services”, to not rely on Google.
If that takes off, then apps will need to support both, making it more sensible to either create stable generic interfaces, where a third completly open-source implementation can more easily dock into, or not rely on them unnecessarily.
The only real problem with android is that the license is not GPL, so companies are not required to cooperate and likely end up creating their own silos.
It is funny to me that they gave up on the Windows phone right when it was starting to actually kinda work and gain some market traction.
It was literally during an era where people were leaving iphone in droves (begrudgingly) for android. Windows phones could have easily stolen a ton of marketshare from Samsung and Google.
