[hbn]

> They abandoned their mobile phone, tablet, and wearable strategy

They were way too late to make a dent. Ballmer made the mistake when the iPhone came out to not get their ass in gear to compete. Microsoft's first potential real competitor to the iPhone came with Windows Phone 7 at the very end of 2010. The iPhone was announced in January 2007 and they didn't have anything to compete until almost 4 years later. I'm not sure how they could have recovered from that by the time they gave up on Windows Phone/Mobile in 2017. Anyone who worked in mobile sales at that time knew most people who did buy a Windows Phone ended up returning it when they realized none of their apps were there. They could have had apps if they recognized the iPhone's threat earlier and reacted appropriately.

Also worth mentioning that in their time competing for mobile they did a fairly hard reset of the platform 2 more times for Windows Phone 8 and Windows 10 Mobile. Go find what developers who tried to keep up have to say

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15432720#15434572

[cyberax]

Yeah, especially funny since they had the early lead with their iPaq PDAs and Windows CE. Which they completely squandered by ignoring them.

Then they acquired Nokia that already had an almost-ready ecosystem of apps, with good snappy UI. And then spent two years building a (shitty) framework on top of the long-neglected Windows CE kernel. Which was known from the start to be a stopgap solution before they port the full WinNT kernel.

[hakfoo]

The difference is that iOS was clearly designed to wow the consumer. It was shiny, it offered the promise of full-scale web browsing and the established media ecosystem. It was not a power tool. (remember the first versions didn't even offer third-party apps).

Windows CE/Mobile was heavily shaped by the corporate presence. People didn't queue up at midnight at Best Buy to buy CE devices, they were sent down from IT and ran a handful of bespoke line-of-business apps. People associated them with big clunky barcode scanner devices, not sleek hi-fi media players. It had all the consumer charm of a corporate lanyard and ID badge.

I'm not sure they could have respun the existing product to get that to "sexy consumer facing item" without a huge rework anyway. And the rework was excellent-- I liked Windows Phone enough to own 3 (a Lumia 1020, then replacing it with a 530 after the screen broke, and a bargain 640 as a modest upgrade) The experience was smooth even on the bottom-range device and it felt more holistically designed than contemporary Android.