Be mindful about windows phone too, it is very revisionist to call it failed; it had all the hallmarks of a successful product except it didn't have developer attention so it died.
It failed in perception, no one developed for it and why would they when MS could break their app compatibility any second with just a single update. It was already even less cool to use than Blackberry, to much enterprise and too little user focus. At the time geeks were unhappy about how the things were going with Windows on PCs. Partnering with MS and taking Elop as their CEO was the final nail in the Nokia coffin. They really should had partnered with one of the asian companies like HTC, they were fierce competitors at the time and guess who bought their mobile division and continues to make pixel phones there. It's easy to say that after the fact, but they could have stayed a niche player, instead Elop chose to completely devalue their brand.
By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed. The best they could have done was simply become another Android OEM.
The final iteration of Windows Mobile was excellent, what killed it wasn't marketing but ecosystem. MS wasn't competing with just Apple or Google. If they were they could have stood a chance, they're just as big, just as technically adept, had just as good a platform (in the end) and just as well capitalised. They could go toe to toe with any company in the world.
They weren't just competing with Apple and Google though, they were competing with them, plus all the existing handset manufacturers that had invested in Android, plus all the developers that were developing or had already released apps on Android or IOs, plus all the companies providing services for those platforms. The ecosystem provides ~10x or more market power than the platform owner on their own. That is what you're actually competing with when you go up against a market incumbent platform owner. It's the crucial difference between a platform and a product.
Sinfosky was responsible for tanking Windows Phone.
Windows Phone 7 could have evolved from Silverlight/XNA models, while evolving the support, maybe adding C++ support in the mix (On WP 7 C++ was only available to selected partners).
Instead WinDev just killed it (similar to how they torpedoed Longhorn), came up with WinRT using an incompatible variant from .NET, that not only dumped Silverlight/XNA, it required multiple reboots (WinRT, UAP and then UWP) always asking us to rewrite the applications between each reboot.
MSIX, WinUI (desktop UWP), .NET 5, C++/WinRT are just the long roadmap of fixing those issues, while trying to make everyone happy again.
Windows Phone 7 was still based on the old Windows CE kernel which couldn't support multiple cores, didn't have true multitasking or support background services, had a limited network stack, the list goes on. Windows Phone 8 finally came out with a true multitasking NT kernel based OS that could compete with the iPhone, 5 years after the iPhone launched.
This is why developer access to the system was so limited, it simply didn't have the sort of process isolation capabilities and the system services this enables that you need in a modern app platform. There's no way they could just open up low level programming to anybody to develop for it and everything would be fine, the skills and knowledge needed to develop for it efficiently and safely were highly specialised.
It’s not true that CE could not support multitasking. Originally CE up to 5.0 had a limitation in the number of processes it supported (32), in order to support more performant task switching (no TLB flushes for one) - though it did not have such a tight limitation on number of threads.
However the version of CE (6, released way back in 2006) that was released on Windows Phone did not have this restriction and version 7 released in 2011 also supported SMP.
Windows CE was really not an entirely incapable OS (and I personally despised it). Its real annoyance was having a completely non-standard bastardized/limited Win32 API which made it both an odd ball embedded RTOS and only vaguely similar to the API of Windows NT. Despite this it had considerable adoption in industrial computing — never a huge market though.
It’s hard to say this was a real problem though as no one considered OS X to be a phone OS before 2007 either. The bigger issue is that clearly MS wanted out from under CE before the phone was even released.
The limitations in Phone 7 were higher level, not due to the underlying kernel.
Sure. They could have pivoted and partnered with automotive industry, Maemo legacy isn't even completely gone yet and it sparked a whole new generation of open source developers. Also as far as I remember Qt were still used in cars.
> By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed.
They had a lot of money and a lot of market share. They could have culled a large part of the organisation, especially due to the insane policy of self-competition resulting in a lineup of almost-but-not-quite-identical handsets, either put more into Maemo/Meego or jumped ship to Android.
Instead they had an MS plant installed at the top who seemed determined to devalue the company then sell off everything to MS, who then just ran the brand into the ground while failing to get Win Phone to launch in any meaningful way.
> By the time Elop took over at Nokia they were already doomed.
Yeah, someone in Nokia engineering had made some company destroying miss calculations.
It's not like the didn't know what they were up against - it was race between engineering teams. And it's not like Nokia the company couldn't fund that race - they were a gorilla in the ring when it came to resources. They even saw the train coming at them, knew what it would do to them, did some awesome things like buy QT in preparation but it was nowhere near enough.
Blind freddy could see the pace of development happening on MeeGo and is predecessor (I forget what it was called) was nowhere near fast enough. Given the resources I expected Nokia to be throwing at it, either the team behind it was tiny, or they were tied up in some titanic tide of red tape go-slow goo.
It's not like it was an impossible ask. That was back in the days of Android Honeycomb and Gingerbread which were clearly something Google has slapped together in a rush. They were IMO barely usable. iPhone was barely more than a phone + ipod back then, granted with the best UI on the planet interface but even then the gulf between what Android would allow you to do what would be possible in Apple's walled garden was apparent, so there was space in the market for a different mix.
> The final iteration of Windows Mobile was excellent, what killed it wasn't marketing but ecosystem.
Well in that case it was obvious what happened. I've lost count of how many "throw it away and start again" iterations Microsoft went through. I do recall using one of their earlier attempts when they had very little competition. It was a Win95 interface crammed into tiny resistive touch screen, complete with start button. It was unusable without the stylus they provided. It had an uptime measured in hours - literally far worse than Win95, which was an amazing "achievement".
They threw major bits of it away and started again, and again, and again, each time with something that was 100% binary incompatible with the previous version so they never built up a customer and app base. Eventually they ended up on the NT kernel with an amazing GUI toolkit that as you quite rightly say was the best in class by any number of engineering metrics, but by that time the network effects of their competitors building up an enormous customer and applications by keeping compatibility completely annihilated them. Numbskulls.
Regarding Windows Phone, on one hand I was pleased to see what should have been .NET in first place, managed runtime built on top of COM, but the way it was rolled out initially incompatible across mobile, tablet and desktop (first WinRT iteration), it was just a mess.
Not only were Windows Phone 7 devs being asked to throw out their beloved Silverlight/XNA tooling, they were being told to rewrite the app three times with #ifdef, and in XNA's case to also move into C++ bare bones DirectX (here is when DirectXTK was born as XNA-like for C++).
How so? It never achieved much market share AFAICT, despite being marketed heavily everywhere from slashdot to the tv.
It had to be relaunched each revision as the platforms were incompatible, it was always way behind on features and playing catch-up... and eventually MS ditched it entirely.
Sure, absent android it could have had a shot. But I wouldn't call the platform a success.
We're talking about a hypothetical situation where android doesn't exist.
Microsoft phone OS 7 (the one that was adapted to the Nokia phones originally designed for MeeGo) was very polished and quite pleasant to use. I think it would have succeeded.
I say this through a clenched jaw though because I had just started working at Nokia during the time of the acquisition and was quite enthusiastic about MeeGo.
Microsoft phone 7 that couldn't use an arbitrary mp3 as a ringtone? Microsoft phone 7 that was pretty much ditched with an incompatible update in next to no time?
I don't think it's revisionist to call it a failure here in this universe where android does exist, like I say, if android didn't exist then maybe it would have taken off. Or maybe another linux variant would have had time to come to market. We shall never know.
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I found the marketing campaigns for Win Phone 7 and Win Phone 8 to be quite offensive. It started months before general availability of even an SDK, with posters on popular tech sites like /. asserting that it was the best platform ever for developers, and trying to get that accepted as some sort of consensus before anyone could even try it.
Then Win phone 7 got unceremoniously ditched (screw you developers) seemingly only a few months later and the exact same people started singing the exact same praises about WP8...
It just smacked of trying too hard, and being underhanded.
> Microsoft phone 7 that couldn't use an arbitrary mp3 as a ringtone?
And iOS which couldn't at the time either.
> Microsoft phone 7 that was pretty much ditched with an incompatible update in next to no time?
Due to no market-share. (Silverlight et al. was an abject failure)
I think it's fine to talk about it as if it's failed in the context of android existing; but the context here is iOS dominance in abstentia of Android itself, and I think there would have been other players (Windows Phone included) which would have contested it given the absence of android.
Windows phone was a contender and it just feels like it wasn't because Android not only won (and thus; you think of Android now vs Windows phone then) but won wildly.
Other phones could, and that seemed to be the expectation of two not-especially-technical friends/colleagues of mine at the time, and the answer being "No, you have to go to this special tool and cut out the first minute, then export in this format" led to both saying "what a pile of crap then, I should have got something else"
How did it not fail? Failing is something that you can only look on after it happened.
I think "failing to capture developer attention" and provide the benefits of that to your users counts as failing. Its just unfortunate that the vendor (MS) doesn't get as much control over that.
Remember we are discussing a parallel universe where Android did not happen. There was a brief time when Microsoft was a not-obviously dead in the water participant in the market. Without Android who knows how that market position had developed.
> Remember we are discussing a parallel universe where Android did not happen.
I think when someone says it's revisionist to call WinPhone a failure, we're talking about this universe. There isn't really a history to revise in an imaginary parallel universe...
Its revisionist to say that it was "never a contender", it was for a short time and lost monumentally. Had Android not existed it would not have lost so monumentally.
Windows phone sits in the minds of many as this "absolute failure that could never have worked" but the reality is that it could have worked had it not floundered so phenomenally in the wake of Android.
I guess that depends on what your threshold is for being "a contender".
All of this is a bit subjective, but if I asked 10 friends and 10 relatives whether they thought Windows Phone was a failure, I'd expect close to 10 friends to say "yes", most of the relatives to say "What is Windows Phone?", and the rest of the relatives (if there were any left) to likely say "yes".
Personally, I'd call that a failure.
Yeah, I know I haven't actually asked the questions (and probably won't), but I think I know my friends and relatives well enough to guess what they would say (mostly based on prior technical discussions).
Again, you're talking about the current state of things and not about the original cited discussion: "what if android didn't exist? would iOS dominate completely?" to-wit I responded that Microsoft might have very well stepped up to the plate, but in the reality we currently live in all OEM's were going Android; Additionally Microsoft crumbles and "pivots" under failure causing them to fail even harder in most cases.
Sorry, been busy last couple of days, and just got back to this.
Yeah, I quoted your "contender" line in my previous response, but I was seeing that as basically equivalent to what you said earlier: "is very revisionist to call it failed" -- which I interpreted to mean that it was a dishonest assessment of what actually happened.
I'm not sure how you can call something "revisionist" if you aren't actually talking about what really happened in history, so maybe that's the source of disconnnect here.
I saw your comment as not being tied to the imaginary universe, but as an aside reflecting your opinion of the value of the Windows Phone in reality.
I suspect that if Android hadn't happened, it is likely that some other entity would have produced a phone that had an equal chance of stomping out Windows Phone. Not that it really matters, because like I said, my opinion is, that in reality Windows Phone was a failure, and I was just responding thinking you were saying that wasn't a fair assessment.
I actually think Windows Phone died only because of the Windows brand. It was otherwise a better product than early Android.
For years (and this may still be the case) the average smartphone user only downloads chat, social media, and games to their phone anyway (if anything at all).
Windows Phone died because Google played dirty. They basically prevented Windows Phone from having decent Google apps such as youtube/google maps. They also did user agent blocks to ensure those web applications didn't work on the phone.
Google did the same thing with Amazon Fire devices. I am frankly surprised they haven't been rung over for anti-trust lawsuit for how they seem to abuse play services.
For a platform the two requirements for determining success are developer attention and money earned by the platform. You can't really have one without the other, but you can have differences between the two metrics and use those differences to plan for the future.
I dont know why people kept calling it revisionist history. Me and everyone I know except for a handful of people really hated how Windows Mobile works. Maybe its great in some way, buts its definitely not great in mainstream user perspective. And its not just because lack of apps. That was a time when I could forgive lack of apps if its meant better smartphone.
