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by mtgx
3028 days ago
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I agree with you until the WP part. WP was always destined to be a failure in the context of that time. It didn't matter that Microsoft paid Nokia billions, because you can't fix everything by throwing more money at the problem. Microsoft learned that the hard way with its investments in the app stores, too, and in other markets, too. People who followed the ecosystems very closely then knew that even Android was lucky to see the success it did against iOS, and that success was almost exclusively due to the fact that "it was there first" to allow the OEMs to unite against iOS as an ecosystem. But even that wasn't easy at all and the fans had to suffer through ~4 years of Android phones being "close, but no cigar" compared to the iPhone. This is why WP had no way of winning a significant portion of the market being multiple years behind in development, interest, and ecosystem. If the roles had been reversed for WP and Android, and WP launched in 2008 and Android in 2011-2012, I don't think Android would've seen too much success either, even though it would be open source. Maybe it would've gotten like 20% of the market if Google played its cards right, but I think WP would have dominated. But yes, the time to shine for Meego (Maemo actually) was immediately after they announced it. However, it was obvious the leadership didn't want to "rock the boat" for the Symbian cash cow. By the time they had to pick between WP and Android, it was of course way too late for Meego. |
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WP's problem was in the length of time between flagship phones, and the length of time between updates.
WP7 came out, with a big marketing push, and it was an overall good OS. The initial wave of phones were received OK, but the platform had some warts that needed to be cleaned up.
What MS did is announce that they were going to release an update, and then do a huge rewrite. 7.5 came out, fixed all the obvious show stopper issues, and then all MS needed to do was keep iterating the platform.
But they didn't. They waited 2 years to release 8.0 instead. Which regressed features from 7.5, asked developers to learn a new API, and had features missing from that API that used to exist in 7.5.
At this point the platform has lost a lot of mind share, new phones need to come out yearly, not on some random scattershot schedule. iOS sees regular platform updates, and is iterating much faster. Android is still a dumpster fire at this point, and could have been eclipsed.
So then WP8 finally comes out. Android is in a much better spot, and iOS looks pretty damn spiffy.
New API, huge chunks of functionality are missing, making many types of apps not even possible to write.
But hey, the Lumia 1020 comes out and gains a TON of attention. The best mobile camera ever made!
And then Microsoft up and does nothing for another two years. They stop releasing flagship handsets, and basically let the brand die.
Finally 8.1 comes out, but by this time it is too late. No developers, the APIs finally aren't terri-bad but they are still miserable to develop for compared to anything else, and all mind share has been lost. 8.1 is actually a good OS (unless you are a developer), but 7.5 was also a good OS, 4 years earlier.
If MS had released updates to the 7.x line every 6 months, focusing on making the developer's lives easier, they could have won. 7.x required far fewer resources than Android, ran much smoother, and performed well on lower cost devices.
But instead someone in the MS engineering department won, and Windows Phone underwent a complete OS rewrite. The reason was merging the Mobile org and the Windows org together, and Engineers played politics instead of writing software, thus one of the kernel teams had to go.