this post was submitted on 21 Dec 2023
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Microsoft were hardly early to the game with Windows phones, compare BlackBerry or Symbian. They had some early successes, for instance against Palm. The big failure was to keep deprecating the existing version of Windows phone, in some cases many months before the ongoing version was available, and deprecating the existing hardware along with it. Look at the whole mango/tango Windows phone 7 /Windows phone 8 debacle
To be fair, they were pretty ahead of the competition when it came to the hardware specs of their phones. The Lumia 950 released in 2015 and had a 1440p AMOLED screen, 3GBs of RAM, biometric unlocking with an iris scanner, and a pretty incredible camera for the time. It also had a removable back cover and battery as well as an AUX port. It was also the first phone I'd seen with USB-C and wireless charging.
Just listing these makes me a bit nostalgic for WP...
Hardware was impressive during Nokia’s glory before apps were a deal breaker.
Microsoft screwed developers hard by making rapid changes to metro layout.
Many of them just gave up and abandoned their apps.
Windows Phone's problem was Steve Balmer, and it was insurmountable. They delayed entering the market for too long and without a large enough user base, there was no way forward to get any real traction in attracting large enough numbers of application developers.
Not enough app developers means dismissal app marketplace means inferior overall user experience relative to Android and iOS, no matter how good the overall hardware or OS was on Windows Phones.
For what it's worth, Satya shutting it down it wasn't any better. At least with Balmer, it may still be alive today. It was actually doing pretty well in certain markets in Europe. All of which they threw away very quickly after Satya took over.
I'm not as familiar with Balmer's time but it sure seems MS under Satya was way more trigger happy when it comes to cancelling and deprecating products.
Those last gen windows phones were really good though.
Same with blackberry and their last gen qnx phones. The passport was such a good device.
Passport was an amazing device I still wish I had mine, I really didn't care there weren't many apps, to me the form and function made up for the lack of apps. Hopefully Punkt will bring to market the MC01 Legend and we'll have the option of a Passport 2.0 if you will.
You can argue that Microsoft was early to the game - they had a smartphone/PDA OS out for years, well before Windows Phone. What they were ridiculously late in doing was reacting to Apple's moves that completely transformed the market.
Early or late, they're hardly ever on time anymore. It also feels like they're going the way of Google and starting to abandon projects.
Development tools completely changed ~yearly as well.
I was talking about when the modern touchscreen smartphones entered the market. After BlackBerry and Symbian. Microsoft partnered with Nokia to create some pretty nice smartphones that were well equipped. Their UI was really nice, too. It would have been a great competitor to Android phones and Apple's iPhones had they kept in the game.
The more competition, the better.
I had a Symbian phone, and it sucked. Just a random observation to add
Microsoft made Sybians?
There's gotta be a joke about Microsoft screwing us all in there I think right?