[mister_hn]

I'm not convinced that it was because of poor timing, but just because of bad App environment. Look what's doing Huawei lately: kicked out of Google Services, it's a well established Phone maker, but it's losing quotas really fast, because their alternative OS (still a fork of Android) doesn't offer important applications to date (e.g. WhatsApp, Banking Apps, Payment Apps and so on), so I believe Microsoft was just crushed because developers weren't attracted by the platform a the buyers weren't interested.

The phones actually were pretty good. The Lumia 920 was really amazing.

[the_hoser]

The poor App ecosystem was a direct result of poor timing. There isn't anything they could have done differently in mid 2010 to improve on that.