[squarefoot]

Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies.

Seriously, once the software is ready, 30 seconds of any popular celebrity showing one would make it sell hundreds thousands in a week. Problem is the small manufacturers couldn't either pay for that level of advertising or satisfy the demand without turning themselves into what they're fighting against now (venture capital, investors etc. don't come free), so I welcome numbers as small as 13k or even much less if that means the product isn't polluted by the typical corporate mindset (close as much as possible to protect intellectual property, make it obsolete sooner to sell newer models, etc).

Oh and by having an unusual phone I can also play the elitist bastard with friends:*)

[lupire]

> once the software is ready

1999 will be the year of Linux on the desktop.

[dmitriid]

Why didn't it work for Windows Phones then?

[squarefoot]

Interesting point. I have seen some friends happily using Windows phones but most of them were/are either Microsoft employees or working mostly with Windows software, so I guess they needed the deepest integration with the Windows ecosystem, which is understandable. As for other users, it is possible that Windows phones had either some limitation compared to other platforms or they lacked the killer app that would make it appealing to other userbases.

Having never used one, I can only speculate that MS wanted to change too much too early by making an user interface very consistent with the one they introduced on PCs but hard to digest just like that one, and this could have brought users away both from the PC and mobile devices. I have always found in the past very hard to migrate non technical users from Windows to Linux, but the adoption of the new interfaces from Windows 8 onward made some people I know so furious that it became really easy to convince them to try Linux; in some cases it was them who asked me to install it. That would be unthinkable before Windows 8. In the mobile world I guess it was even harder to grow an userbase since the alternative was already mainstream.

They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.

[dmitriid]

> They probably should have copied or mocked a mainstream mobile interface, that is, offer something an user from either Android or iOS would not find alien to use, then offer something more, say free Office apps, then after the userbase had grown start to build the rest.

Why would the user base grow? The main problem Windows Phone had was the dearth of apps that users actually wanted. MS had to build their own YouTube client (and IIRC got into trouble with Google).

They've sunk billions into it: enticing developers, outright paying for the development of apps, creating apps on their own, spending huge amounts of money on advertisement (I remember at one point when half of popular TV shows featured Windows Phones). The result?

It did sell ~100 million phones in about 5 years and then discontinued the entire enterprise.

So, back to the original claim:

> Give FOSS phones the same media coverage of the iPhone, possibly including its ad induced reality distortion field, and they will sell like candies.

Why would it work for a FOSS phone when it didn't for MS?

[squarefoot]

Because the number of potential developers on this platform is at least an order of magnitude bigger than all Windows Mobile developers on this planet. Probably more. Developers also that happen to be the first users as well, an aspect very different from the one Windows Mobile had to struggle into. If ths thing turns out as interesting as it promises there would be hundreds thousands of people willing to work on various tasks to bring it on par with other platforms. That day we'd have to find a benevolent dictator, sort of a mobile version of Linus Torvalds, which would direct them various teams right to the spot, since it's very likely that groups being working on say accounting software (just to name the most boring thing to me if I was in their shoes) would proceed at 1/4 speed compared to those working on say video acceleration or networking tools.

It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model, normal phones users will start to notice that little thing that doesn't get advertising, doesn't ask for DNA when installing apps, doesn't spy what the user says, writes, buys or where he/she goes and when, consumes a fraction of their metered data plan since great part of it (ads/junk/telemetry) has been blocked or never requested/created by design, offers equivalent non spying apps etc, all at the cost of avoiding the usual social media apps (I assume FB/TW will never allow a port of their clients there, especially if sandboxed). For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase. If I had a date to be concerned about, it will be the day its growing userbase size could raise a flag in some offices, so that the following day the folks that made it possible will get a huge offer to sell the entire operation. That eventuality would deem the project to become a copy of any other platform out there. There's hardware production involved; forking the blueprints wouldn't be enough.

[dmitriid]

> Because the number of potential developers on this platform is at least an order of magnitude bigger than all Windows Mobile developers on this planet.

Why? Where do these potential devs suddenly come from? Just fro the fact it's a FOSS phone? Looking at how Linux has struggled for years (and is still struggling) to get decent software, your premise seems broken.

> If ths thing turns out as interesting as it promises there would be hundreds thousands of people willing to work on various tasks to bring it on par with other platforms.

Why would they? Why would there be hundreds of thousands of such people? Especially considering that the vast majority of software is commercial software that needs users.

Users do not flock to something just because developers do.

> It will start as a community toy, then one day, possibly after the 2nd or 3rd model

And then you list dozens of things each of which has a very low probability of happening. And then those improbabilities compound.

> For some people losing FB/TW or GMaps could be too much, but others wouldn't care. It will slowly but steadily gain a good mostly technical userbase.

You underestimate the numbers in this "mostly technical userbase". It's not the first phone to cater to a "mostly technical userbase". None of these phones survived past a first iteration. Somehow, no thought is given to why these projects failed. But the new one will surely become popular, will have multiple iterations and a good user base.

Yeah, sure.

The definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results

[bluGill]

It was working, but Microsoft didn't have the patience to wait, and wasn't willing to be number 3 for a long time. If Microsoft had continued the project they could have continued to be a distant third place making enough money to keep the lights on in that division - but it would never be insanely profitable and they were not willing to settle for that.

I don't know if they were right or not.

[dmitriid]

The market had already spoken by the time MS discontinued the project. Windows Phone reached a peak of about 3.5% of users and then started declining, quite rapidly.

Given that ~100% of money was going to the iOS and Android ecosystem, MS had no chance to retain even a few percent of the market: developers would not be interested in developing software for an obscure system that brings in no money, users would not be interested in a phone with little to no software.

[pjmlp]

In Europe it peaked around 10% when Microsoft cut the rope.