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Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
(www.theverge.com)
this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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Windows Phone failed because there were no apps for it. There was no YouTube app, no Facebook app, no Twitter app, etc until very late or never at all. They should have just paid developers to make the apps so that people would buy the phones. The OS was great and worked on a wide range of hardware. It could have been a great enterprise solution and they seemed to be heading that direction but the lack of third party made it little more than A Microsoft feature phone.
They literally couldn’t pay the devs. Netflix for instance flat out refused to have blackberry pay for 2 full time devs to maintain an app.
Netflix looked at the market share and determined that there was 0 benefit. The people that were on blackberry devices already had a Netflix account.
Additionally Blackberry store apps were compelling for devs. Dev feedback included ease of development and more importantly they made a lot more money on the blackberry store than on iOS/android, both because the cut was better and they could jack the prices up because the customers were not nearly as frugal.
To get into mobile would require a massive overhaul of windows apps to get them mobile-friendly
Oh look, that’s exactly what they did and now we have PWAs for lots of apps. Maybe MS is getting ready to take a stab at mobile again.
Netflix have a different relationship with Microsoft than they did with Blackberry, MS would have had much more clout.
Actually, the main cause it failed was because Microsoft bullied the manufacturers until they said enough and bailed out. So they were forced to buy a manufacturer to keep going (Nokia) then gave up halfway through after buying it.
Microsoft has stupid amounts of cash and could have kept Windows Phone going indefinitely, even at a loss. It's how they broke into the console market, by keeping the Xbox going at a loss for a decade.
Yeah the lack of apps would have been a problem initially but everybody would have relented given enough time, and in the meantime most of the missing services could have been accessed in a browser.
They couldn’t even be bothered developing their own apps for it. The mail app began to lag behind Outlook on Android, Minecraft was never ported to it when it could have been a killer exclusive app.
Google was often guilty of that too. I remember a number of Android apps that were pretty far behind the iOS ones. I don't think that is the case anymore though.
There were also a bunch of iOS apps behind Android ones. Remember when iOS finally got widgets? Different companies focused on different functionality first. But at this point, android and iOS have had the time to play catch-up with each other.
Difference being that Apple does not make Android apps. Google's own apps on iOS were behind their own on Android. I recall the YouTube and Maps app missing some features for quite a while on Android that were on IOS. I get that companies silo teams from each other but it's a little embarrassing when you're software on your platform is behind your software on your competitor's platform.
OS-wise, yeah it has largely been Apple playing catch up with iOS aside from messaging.
That reminded me when the Remote Desktop app turned up on Android before the Windows Phone. Ludicrous.
I knew it would be this before it loaded and I am happy to be reminded of it. Baller was such a weirdo.
Holy fuck he looks like he'd been on a cocaine binge for days.
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Oh my word, why have I never seen this before?
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Developers
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This was the downfall of BlackBerry as well.
QNX-based BB10 OS was phenomenal, and their hardware was top notch.
It was the lacking app ecosystem that killed it.
You need to read up on the fall of Blackberry. It was extremely badly mismanaged. It wasn't the lack of apps that killed them.
I was a BB developer right around the time of their demise. It never mattered how good or bad their OS was, because the development environment for BB was complete shit - which was a big part of why nobody wrote apps for it.
Blackberry at their end (circa 2011 or so) started handing out $10,000 grants to developers to make apps for them. I thought about applying for one, but $10K is not much at all to develop a decently-featured app that does anything, and BB's development environment was such an unbelievable clusterfuck that really no amount of money could have made worthwhile to endure.
Also: 16-bit color lol.
What the fuck?
5 bits each for red and blue and 6 for green. Who needs more than that?
The only reason I liked it at all was that I created a lot of owner-drawn controls (since the built-in Blackberry "fields" were shit) that used a lot of bitmap memory for animation, and reducing your memory footprint by a factor of two (compared to 32-bit graphics) wasn't worthless, especially for the older devices.
Snapchat was the big one missing that really put the nail in the coffin towards the end there.
I really miss the OS.... My favorite phones at the time
They totally did that
The problem was that people weren’t really interested in any of it.
The UI was cluttered and messy to look at, none of it was as polished or natural to use as iOS or Android.
Plus there was no Google Maps, no Google Docs (and Office 365 wasn’t around to replace it), even that apps that were in the store felt pretty bad quality. I had Spotify on my iPhone and it was nearly flawless, when I switched to Windows Phone it kept cutting out or crashing or disconnecting from the mobile connection, it just wasn’t fully baked.
That is because every single mobile version of Windows was incompatible (After version 6) with the previous. They kept reinventing the wheel over and over again.
Yep, if you don't even have the stuff the first iPhone came with, your platform isn't going to make it.
The first iPhone didn’t come with those things. There wasn’t even an App Store until a year and a half after it came out. The first gen was pretty much crap. It didn’t have 3g when other phones of the time did. It had the best browser but it was slow as shit. The whole page would turn gray when you scrolled around. There was no copy/paste. You couldn’t sync with Exchange. It was missing basic features that other phones of the time had. It was probably the 3GS or the 4 when it got really good.
It did have YouTube and maps.
WP had a far superior 3rd party YouTube app than any other platform's first party app at the time. The only reason why they didn't have a first party was because Google was intentionally throwing road blocks to prevent it from happening.
They also had Nokia's maps which at the time were somehow faaar superior to Google's, even though Google Maps was the most popular platform.
The first iPhone didn't have anything. In terms of features it was laughable and it could barely be considered a smartphone. It succeeded because it was a phone on a touch screen that worked better than any previous attempt at touch screens.
Everything that made iPhone relevant against Android only came out later. Apple had a large quick start on hardware and UX, Android had a large quick start on the feature set. They both worked to close the gap and now we have two very similar products.
Microsoft didn't have that gap with Android on the OS level in any way. It could do everything. But they didn't have apps, because the devs didn't want a third OS to exist. Devs who just wanted to expand their customer base were making apps for wp just fine. Companies who wanted to manipulate the market into what was more convenient for them did not. Regular folks were making apps to get YouTube, Snapchat, Instagram and that sort of stuff working on wp just fine - someone even made a Pokémon Go client that actually worked on windows phone, but the companies behind those platforms actively wanted those apps to not exist in any way.