[paxys]

Nah they just joined the race too late. Remember that Steve Ballmer was laughing at and dismissing the iPhone when it launched ("it's too expensive, no one will use it, it doesn't even have a keyboard"). Microsoft continued pushing Windows Mobile at that time and even spent $1B+ acquiring Danger and releasing Kin (remember that disaster?). Then Windows Phone 7 finally launched in 2010 and was rebooted again in 2012 with Windows Phone 8. By that time the mobile OS market was a duopoly, and neither users nor developers nor manufacturers cared for a third platform.

[sheepscreek]

When discussing disasters, it’s impossible to ignore BlackBerry. They crafted solid devices, and their downfall from a hardware company is a tragic one. They grew too big and failed to adapt in times of “war” with a diminishing market share. However, I firmly believe they could have maintained a loyal user base over the years, at least large enough to allow them to fight another day.

Their user interface was a true gem - beautiful yet functional. The devices were incredibly fast, and the optical cursor was a revelation. I genuinely believe the way the trackpad cursor functions on the iPad is inspired by BlackBerry’s design.

[zeroq]

I always think about BlackBerry as another Kodak.

They owned their space in their time, nothing came close, and then, one day, times have changed and their product become obsolete. I don't blame them.

It's cool to sit on HN and think everyone should pivot on a yearly basis, but in reality it rarely happens for companies that big. It takes a lot of time and effort to change to course of a tanker ship, and when you're in position that you have a product that is precisely on point, competition can't touch you, the most reasonable thing to do is just not to fuck things up... and then it's too late. Sometimes. Most of the time it's the winning strategy.

If anything, Nokia was distaster.

[Dylan16807]

I blame them. When you have that kind of money you can not fuck things up and invent new things.

[sumedh]

Its difficult for leadership when you are already making billions to change ship, if you are the guy who proposes it, gets approval to work on it then executes and if the plan fails you are probably out of that cushy job.

So it makes sense not to rock the boat.

[zdragnar]

My only experience with BB was awful, though it was at the perfectly wrong time. I was responsible for developing an app for the Storm and it was really the worst of both worlds.

[jitl]

Storm was so funny to me. My lawyer older cousin got one excitedly and it felt like such a dinosaur compared to year old iPhones.

[elictronic]

The lawyers I knew wrote tons of emails. Touch screens of earlier iphones were just not as good for writing long formally worded replies.

It would be like trying to write code on an iPhone today.

[jitl]

The storm was virtual keyboard only, and a markedly worse one where you had to click in the whole screen. Worst aspect of touchscreen keyboard (finger placement, no keyfinding haptics, still need to look directly at it) with the added slowness of needing to click the biggest possible button - one the size of a whole phone.

[pwthornton]

Storm was a very un-Blackberry phone and objectively awful. It should never have been released.

[DrBenCarson]

They were already working on Windows Phone when Ballmer said that. That’s why he said it. They were targeting a lower cost segment.

Android, courtesy of being open source, was just able to move much faster

I think if they had just open sourced the OS, like Android, instead of killing it, Windows Phone could have been a decent Android competitor

[sheepscreek]

I think so. Heck, why don’t they open source it now? Although my guess is it’s a lot of low level C++ that I wouldn’t touch with a 10 foot pole. But I’ve been surprised before. What if they used dotnet?

[microtherion]

I suspect it shared quite a bit of code with the regular windows codebase, so open sourcing it would have exposed a lot of proprietary code (and not necessarily only their own — there may have been licensed bits that they would not even have been allowed to open source).