Microsoft phone revenue fell to $5M last quarter, from $1.4B two years ago | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft phone revenue fell to $5M last quarter, from $1.4B two years ago

neowin.net

147 pointsdoener127 comments

I really, really liked my Nokia Windows phone. The tile based UI, the smooth performance and snappy UX, an excellent camera and the way the battery could last for sometimes 3 whole days without charging. Android phones just don't compare. And though I like MacOS, I could never get iOS.

Microsoft gave up the war here in the last 10%. They should have put their head down and persisted. Alas, now we just have two flavors of phone..

I'm amazed by how much MS messed up Windows Phone. At a certain point they were right to give up, but only because of their own incompetence.

I bought a Windows Phone 7 device. Loved it. Still the best mobile UI I've experienced. It had a ton of smart ideas too, like integrating different messaging services into a central app - totally breaking up the app-centric model of iOS and Android.

...except they didn't provide any hooks for third party apps to integrate. Said it was coming. Along with multitasking and other stuff that was already common in other OSes. It never did. Instead they announced Windows Phone 8, and stated that almost all WP7 devices would be ineligible for an upgrade, thus burning their relationship with early adopters. I believe they did the same with some devices from WP8 to 10. Nowadays they've given up everything that made WP unique, so there's no need to use it.

Sad thing is, their initial timing was great. Google had dropped the ball on Android - developing an entire version specifically for tablets (3.0) while the phone OS floundered. Compared to Android 2.3, Windows Phone was a breath of fresh air. But by the time they'd decided my phone was EOL less than a year later, Android 4 was out. I switched back with no regrets. Don't get me wrong, it would have been an insane uphill climb for anyone, but MS, with their resources and XBox etc., if anyone could have entered the market, it could have been them.

I would LOVE to go back to a Windows Mobile phone, like when it was Windows Mobile 6, that I HAD CONTROL of my device, I could access my registry, my autoruns, my hosts, MY NOTES WOULD SYNC (bad-bad-Apple) and there was plenty of software/games/utilities in the WM6 ecosystem.

I had asked the MS community a few weeks back whether W10(mob) is anything like the 6, and surprise-surprise, it was not. No option for a "firewall with learning-mode", no ability to modify OS to my liking/specs. They tried to mimic iOS "close-ness" in the worse possible way. At least iOS has the JB community which works miracles (e.g. Firewall IP)

I think MS was better when they were licensing a very nice WM6 OS to O2, Qtek, and more. Now that ship has sailed.

ps: I think that W10 is more of an attempt to get a piece of the "all your bases are belong to us" (telemetry, snooping on everything, move every-bit-possible to THEIR cloud. I see the/their convenience into doing so, but that makes it a no-buy for me.

Yes, instead of having two OSses with one application API during the transition with Windows 95 and Windows NT (Win32), with Windows 8 they made one OS with two different API's, costing almost two years and bringing no benefits to users, throwing early adopters and developers under the bus.

Like the GP, I also miss my Windows Phone, but Windows 8 killed the opportunity they had.

Blackberry OS 10 has an integrated hub for all communications as well. I've never tried Windows Phone, but I can't see anything me much slicker than that. Didn't do them any favours either, and they started off with a larger base. The lack of an app ecosystem, and some unfounded sentiments of it being obsolete did them in.

I'm on my 2nd BB Classic, and will likely stock up a couple more to last me some years, as there's no better phone for email and ssh. And the few apps I do need that aren't supported I can still run using the Android runtime.

Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried. Not sure why but it's just something they are not good at from end to end, even if some of the pieces are technically pretty good.

> Microsoft and mobile has been a disaster every time they've tried.

Not true. Windows CE was a solid offering.

I'm going to agree with this. People forget how spartan Palm OS was in comparison, and the balkanized Linux mobile offerings as well as the lack of a good mobile UI toolkit. Making mobile apps for Win CE was a breeze compared to Palm OS.

By what metrics?

Every implementation of this I've seen has been a slow burn disaster. It's still deployed, and it still sucks.

I assume they meant the original release/products. In the late '90s, CE palmtop computers were a joy. I had no idea it was still deployed; it can't have any real connection to those little pocket PCs I loved.

They were loved by extreme early adopters. In practice they were a nightmare: Limited software options, terrible battery life, brutally awful screens, ridiculously big and heavy. They were like a laptop computer crammed into a brick with all the useful features stripped out.

I knew a few people that loved them, but they were not ordinary people.

That's rather overstating things. They were limited, yes, but they were fine for doing email, taking notes, and playing text adventures, which was pretty much what I wanted them to do. This was the late '90s; nobody expected a pocket device to have a full-featured web browser and a massive library of apps. The batteries in mine were for good several days to a week of normal use. 480x240 greyscale was plenty for text-only work. They were certainly less powerful than a laptop, but they were also a lot cheaper, at least at the prices I was seeing in late '97. And they did well enough that several different manufacturers released several generations of machines each, over a period of years.

The Windows CE devices I saw had color screens with a comically narrow viewing angle, incredibly huge batteries that lasted a hilariously short amount of time, and required a fussy little pen to use since most operations could not be done by keyboard alone.

I'm not saying it was totally useless, or that people didn't find it "fine" for some tasks, but it was like a crippled notebook that could barely do any of those things. The only advantage it had was size, and even then it still weighed vastly more than any of the phones from that era. They still cost a small fortune, maybe half the cost of a decent laptop, but since they weren't a laptop or a phone you still had to get one of those anyway.

Compare with two competitors from that time, Danger Hiptop and Sharp Zaurus, took a very different approach: Keyboard centric, good battery life, limited functionality but focusing on specific things rather than trying to do everything.

I never used the later/color models, so that may be the difference. I'm sure it jacked up the battery burn. The B&W ones ran for a good while, and you could find low-end models for $150 or so.

As I recall, the pen was fiddly but not necessary; the screen was pressure-sensitive, so you could use a fingertip just fine, or the eraser end of a pencil. Modern capacitative touchscreens are much more accurate, but I sometimes miss being able to use any object as a stylus. :)

Those are hardware issues with devices from that era, and have little to do with the OS. The iPhone 1 was far more powerful than the CE devices.

The technical underpinnings of Windows Phone 7 were total crap because it was based on Windows CE. If they had started with NT then things might have been different.

The phones and the operating system were great, but the ecosystem was not there and that was a problem. I used 920 and 930, but then switched to iPhone due to lack of 3rd party software (either the software was completely missing or the features arrived late).

I'm typing this on a 925, and I'll use it for as long as it works. I've come to see the ecosystem problem as a blessing in disguise. The promise of windows phone in the early adverts was that you would get in and out quickly, and not waste time that could be spent socialising, or with family. They delivered on that, though not the way they intended. The lack of apps means I don't waste time on my phone. The latest games aren't there. Major apps are unavailable. No pinterest. No ebay app. Crappy youtube experience. These are all good things. The temptation to install timesinks is far less, because even when they are available, they're generally quite poor quality compared to the IOS or android alternatives

I have more free time because I'm on windows phone, and that's worth a lot

Why even get a smartphone if all you want is the basics? Might as well get a feature phone and enjoy the extra battery life.

I browse HN, take a lot of photos and make notes on OneNote. But to be honest I've often been tempted. The camera is probably the thing I'd most miss - I take a lot of photos of my kids and a feature phone camera won't cut the mustard

You can get a feature phone for $20; that leaves quite a bit for a decent point-and-shoot.

yes, but then you have to carry two things in your pocket, and you still can't browse HN or take notes on OneNote with either of them.

Microsoft rebooted the platform so many times there was no opportunity to grow the ecosystem. The only way to build an ecosystem is slow and steady but Microsoft was too impatient for that. When they didn't immediately get success they just threw everything out and started again... twice!

Somewhat agree, I have a 950 and a lit of android/ios apps are here just not all. Last time I checked out of the top 20 on android windows phone has 17/20.

I find most games pointless battery life on all phones already sucks.

I felt the same about my Lumia 630. I broke the screen and ended up switching to some HTC abomination because I needed Android, but the 640 was cheap, smooth, fast, well ahead of its time in mobile UI and it was actually pleasant to use.

I can't believe how badly MS have handled Windows Phone. Splitting the market between WP 7/8/10 was insane given how small a user base they had.

Try a Blackberry KeyOne when it's released in May. It runs the latest version of Android without any lags, has a physical keyboard for simple use (shortcuts for everything), has the same camera as the Google Pixel (v.good) and packs a 3500mAh battery that will last more than a day with moderate use.

I'm using one now and it's nothing short of excellent.

It may use the same sensor as the Pixel, but it doesn't have the Pixel camera processing algorithms. Those Pixel algorithms are a big reason why it's considered to have the best smartphone camera.

I heavily considered purchasing a Lumia 950 when looking to upgrade my Android phone. Unfortunately, the community pretty much drove me away, not because they were toxic, but because they claimed the platform was dead and no one suggested getting into Windows Mobile 10. If Microsoft releases a new WM 10 phone with a fingerprint sensor and a decent set of specs, I might consider picking one up and bearing the "app problem". I like the fact that Microsoft updates the devices directly and I can go into a Microsoft store if I have a problem.

The HP Elite x3 has a fingerprint reader (also an iris scanner, like the 950 and 950 XL)

If it was bill gates or ballmer's microsoft they might have gone on. They lost billions on Xbox and Bing, but they still kept at it. I guess Xbox turned out pretty good, but they sunk a ton of money on it. I guess the new Microsoft management is not interested in losing money. Google realized their core business is search and getting google search on phones was paramount even if they had to pay manufacturers to put their search engine there.

I remember getting a pamphlet at GameStop or something around the original XBox launch with all the reasons I should get one. They actually spent some time saying, essentially, "Microsoft is rich as hell and doesn't give up, so even if it's not successful immediately there will be new game support for years." I guess that worked out for them.

This would be the same Ballmer who laughed on national TV at the iPhone announcement?

Persisted = Burn millions of $ because some insignificant minuscule minority happens to like their phones.

Billions of dollars. Windows Phone has been failing for years, and the same chorus has been saying "just a little bit more!" while Microsoft dumped billions and a large amount of goodwill into a clearly failed venture. They put more effort into it that the overwhelming bulk of businesses on the planet could ever imagine. There's a point where it's just a lot of good money and effort after a futile cause.

People's discussions about Windows Phone -- the invariable commentators who talk about how great it is -- is the sort of thing I'm incredibly wary about, having been misled by it before in this field. The people professing love for Windows Phone almost invariably spent very little time with it (and haven't dealt with the enormous number of flaws and gaps), or have a profound bias to like it regardless.

As a developer across a number of platforms, and with no affinity or vow of loyalty to any of the makers, I think it was a terrible platform that had tiny nuggets of promise, but never a compelling enough reward profile.

I have had my 950 for almost a year, I always read "bugs that have never been fixed" I haven't seen anything as such.

I'll agree it has gaps and the settings is all over the place, wallpapers in personalise and not under display. I get it, its just not like any other mobiles os, even screen time out isn't in display its in lock screen.

It also has annoying links to faq at the bottom of every single page.

I believe many people would argue that 'computing in the 21st century happens on the phone' not on the desktop or laptop for a large fraction of the population. And because of that, it would seem the worlds leading software vendor would want to participate there. So persistence here is not perceived as throwing away billions for a small minority, so much as investing billions so that you're a credible alternative to tens if not hundreds of millions of users. That keeps your company tuned up in the most dominant software delivery mechanism of our time and avoids overall company death by irrelevancy.

Yeah, I can't find the article now but there's always a group of consumers out there that have a strong affinity for products that have failed in the market. Anything from soft drinks to candy to fast food to electronics devices - they're among the greater predictors of a product failure than any focus group could offer. I'm someone that was all about alternatives to MP3 such as Ogg Vorbis and VQF and ripped nearly 300 CDs to them before giving up and just going with... FLAC, which at least lets me pick and choose whatever I want in the future.

Were you thinking of the following article?

Eric Anderson, Song Lin, Duncan Simester, and Catherine Tucker (2015) Harbingers of Failure. Journal of Marketing Research: October 2015, Vol. 52, No. 5, pp. 580-592.

It was posted to HN in July 2015[0] and a PDF is at [1].

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9839344

[1] http://www.bm.ust.hk/mark/staff/song_lin/song_lin-jmr-2015.p...

Thanks for that. I wonder how many of us in this readership have "flop affinity", given often very particular tastes and goals?

The minority that likes their phones may be miniscule in comparison to say the iPhone. But in the phone market a small market share can still equal billions a year.

There is room for them to carve out a niche of Microsoft Phones earning them a couple of billion in revenue, and a couple of hundred million in profit. However for a big company like Microsoft that money is a drop in the ocean, and they want to own the market which at this point in time is unrealistic for them unless they can produce something truely groundbreaking.

It's the ecosystem. My friend swore by his Android, always telling me how he could never switch to iOS. Until one day one app that he REALLY wanted to use had a nice polished iOS version but the Android version was clearly total crap with no obvious intention to improve, since then he's switched to iOS and isn't talking too much about Android anymore.

So even if you have a small following, those people eventually drop off too one by one over things like this.

That could be said for any phone system, the photo gallery and editing on windows phone is extremely good.

Your friend could have easily gone from iPhone to android for the same reason.

I think the point is that any given person is more likely to find an app they "can't live without" on Android/iOS than on WinPhone, just because there's so many more to choose from.

But new phones are incredibly sophisticated devices requiring a lot of investment to create and bring to market, so maybe even billions a year of revenue might not be enough.

That's true hence from that revenue they might only be able to squeeze tens or maybe hundreds of millions in profit from it. Which for Microsoft is in their eyes probably not worth the effort.

>>The minority that likes their phones may be miniscule in comparison to say the iPhone. But in the phone market a small market share can still equal billions a year.

Ah yes, the good old "even if we captured only 1% of this huge market we would make billions!" argument.

And the native app model for WP was a pleasure to code against, compared to Android or iOS.

I agree, I had a windows phone and I actually liked the UI, simple clean, the 5 things I used the most often in nice big blocks, easy for me to find quickly. Too bad, I just feel like the whole phone scene has fallen into a duopoly, Apple iPhone and Samsung Android. I liked the idea of having a strong #3. Maybe it is my soft spot for the underdog, but I miss having a richer phone space. I know, I know, this is HN so someone will bring up some obscure thing I am supposed to know about like an Ubuntu phone or something, but let's keep it real guys, there are 2, keepin' it 100, K?

I think that Nokia would have been better off had they devoted their resources towards the Meego OS (along with providing an easy way to use existing Symbian applications on the new platform.

I'm still using my Nokia N9 and am pretty satisfied with it. Unfortunately, there won't be any updates (and, as far as I know, I can't hey a Jolla phone here in the US).

you can have smooth tiled experience in Android as well, as for battery if you use it same way as windows phone with almost zero apps and killing background processes you can have same battery life

windows phone used pretty low end low power CPU which don't eat much

or you really think windows can manage resources better than Android?

Two flavors of phone, plus however many flavors of Android.

So why exactly do we have a crippled desktop experience in Windows 10 now? Because it needed to look like a platform that effectively doesn't exist anymore?

And I like Windows Phone a lot. Perfect for people that just wanted a simple phone with decent support.

I recently got an older Surface Pro 1st gen.

And it came with Windows 8.1. And I reminded how awful the UI was compared to 10. That mix between Tablet/Touch and Desktop, when Microsoft was in a very pigheaded way.

The true 'crippled' nature of Windows 10 isn't the UI. It's the intrusive always on Updates, Apps, ads on your desktop, popups on your lockscreen, etc that 'cripple' it.

> The true 'crippled' nature of Windows 10 isn't the UI. It's the intrusive always on Updates, Apps, ads on your desktop, popups on your lockscreen, etc that 'cripple' it.

I have a WIndows 10 PC and have never seen any of these things (ads, popups, etc)..

Windows Update is on, but why would I not want that? It's on all my other systems and devices.

Hyperbole serves no one...

I've seen a lot of articles about Microsoft pushing ads on the lock screen and have come to realize they mean the wallpapers that have the Bing logo at the bottom or a nice looking picture from the app store. People are also mad that there's a link in the file explorer to try out OneDrive (funny enough I'm staring at an iCloud Drive link on my Mac's file explorer right now and no one seems to care) and articles started to blow up about how to remove it. So now people are convinced that it's a problem and that they have to get rid of it or Microsoft wins.

Also updating your software is a bad thing, because this is 1994 and no one ever attacks Internet-facing computer systems.

In what way is the desktop experience crippled? The way I use it is petty much identical to my Windows 7 experience.

The desktop experience is awful just from an aesthetics point of view because you've got two flavors of look and feel and you've got to jump from one to the other constantly to get anything done. You want users to develop an intuition for how to do things with your UI, and that's quite a lot harder when they've got to manage one set of intuitions for your tablet-like interface, and another set of intuitions for your legacy desktop interface.

Now I'm not a big fan of the Surface look and feel at all. It feels out of place on a desktop. But, I'd settle with it if they would just use it consistently, instead of forcing me to switch back and forth.

And, while migrating functionality from one to the other, stuff gets dropped. Just as one extremely annoying example that I discovered recently: there is no way to manage networks without digging into the registry. In Windows 7 you can bring up Network and Sharing Center and click on the network icon (the house or the bench) for your active network. This brings you to the Network Properties dialog from which you can merge or delete redundant networks. It's a small thing but it does start to get annoying when you're on "home-network 17", and especially if you're a mobile user this happens a lot. In Windows 7 this is really easy to resolve - the feature has been completely removed from Windows 10 (the icon isn't even there anymore). The only way to resolve it that I've found is to use regedit.

That's one small example, but the OS is littered with this stuff. It's just really poorly designed and frustrating to work with, and while I'm happy with the improvements to the OS under the hood, the surface stuff is just so awful that I'm seriously considering switching my laptop back to Windows 7.

Surface still exists. And there's still warts in the uncanny valley between mouse and touch, but I wouldn't call Windows 10 crippled.

I'm more puzzled at UX problems in OSX, where there isn't the excuse of having to support hundreds of vendors.

I would of loved to have ditched Android for Windows Mobile but the hardware options were poor. I couldn't find a phone that had any challenging specs to the Android options. I care mostly about battery life these days, if Microsoft would of released more phones and with competitive specs I would probably still have one of their phones. I only saw one option on my carrier, and it had 8 hours of battery life, compared to phones that boasted 22 hours of battery life it's not very impressive.

I had a Windows Phone, battery life was much better than the Nexus 5/X phones I've had since.

Windows Phone was much better about resource usage than Android, so the numbers you saw were pretty meaningless.

The lack of apps was a real issue though.

> The lack of apps was a real issue though.

About apps: recently -- i.e. just during the past few weeks -- I've been seeing adaptations of top-tier designr board-games -- e.g. Terra Mystica and Galaxy Trucker -- showing up for Windows Phone, in addition to iOS/Android. Previously, adaptations like this were essentially unheard of.

I've been wondering what has changed to make this happen, if anyone has any ideas -- e.g. have Windows Phone tablets reached a critical mass that would make Windows Phone an increasingly attractive platform for these games?

would have

English is my second language, so I apologize for that?

I think the desktop is more closely related to the tablet platform than mobiles.

> So why exactly do we have a crippled desktop experience in Windows 10 now?
We don't? Can you clarify what you're referring to?

I don't get why you're being downvoted, I find the Windows 10 experience to be excellent on desktop and on the Surface.
I get that some people might disagree with this, but could they at least care to explain why instead of downvoting?

It's a shame to say goodbye to Windows Phone (WP), although it's not surprising.
I have a Windows phone and think the Windows Phone OS is probably the best thing that Microsoft has designed. Their desktop apps and operating systems have a reputation for being clunky and clumsy to use (which I agree with), but Windows Phone (starting with version 7) was a surprisingly well-designed mobile operating system.
Yes, WP lacked features compared to Android and iOS, but that simplicity was also arguably a strength (although they started over-complicating the home screen in Windows Phone 10 in my opinion).
The other nice thing about Windows Phone was that it was actually different from both Android and iOS. That too made for a refreshing change. Instead of the generic grid-of-icons approach, you had tiles of different sizes that could display app updates.
Finally, I was impressed by the visual design philosophy behind Windows Phone when it first launched. The designers took inspiration from wayfinding and airport and metro signage. That made sense for a mobile phone - you quickly glance at your phone multiple times a day, often while you're on the move. You need clear, large type to make this easy. The designers seemed to have purposefully chosen to emphasize type for this reason over the more icon-based approach of iOS and Android, although this sadly seemed to diminish somewhat with Windows Phone 10.

My thoughts, exactly. Thank you for putting them in to words.

Phone hardware was always a bad fit for microsoft. They always saw it as a vehicle for making a platform play, but to make good phones you have to see it as an end unto itself. The phone is the business you are in, not the platform that the phone happens to run on.

Agreed that Microsoft saw it more as an accessory to Windows PCs, at least early on. However, ultimately WP lost because it was too late. iOS and Android were too much ahead. Exactly why it was such a catastrophic mistake for Nokia to go with WP over Android "because it was different."
Not saying that Android would've necessarily saved Nokia's crown in the smartphone market, or even saved it as a company, but I do think it would've been a smarter strategic play than going with WP. And the only reason I'm even saying that is because Nokia did a ton of mistakes on its own, before it even had to make that choice - like waiting until it was too late to make the decision, or neglecting the Maemo platform, and so on.

Also, Nokia didn't have to choose between Microsoft and Google. They could have done both, like Samsung did.
In terms of attracting programmers, Android could be programmed on Mac, Windows or Linux. A developer account was a one-time fee of $25. Apps needed no approval.
Windows Phone had to be programmed on Windows. A developer account cost $100 a year or so. Apps went through an approval process. Not that different than Apple, but Apple was first to market with a modern smartphone and could get away with this.

Nokia couldn't do what Samsung did. They lacked factories for NANDs, CPUs, RAM, screens, camera sensors.

I think Nokia could have done both Symbian and Maemo and even something else still (if the leadership had not been complacent). But that is all water under the bridge.

They tried to improve Symbian - I've got their latest and greatest Symbian device, the 808 and it's a joke.
Even if they could do Maemo, there would've been no apps - Microsoft failed to attract enough devs, given that there were already 10M .NET devs out there.

Actually, Nokia as a company is doing rather well. Just the handset business was rebooted.

Actually Nokia market cap is 30G, while Apple's 750G, 90% of which is "the handset business".

Sure, but a 30G company is still not exactly small.

Nokia's cap was 300G at one time, it was bigger than Apple when the iPhone came out and it was the leader on the booming smartphone market. They lost a lot of value, fired a lot of people, lost their biggest market - which is not "doing rather well" for a publicly traded business ...

I'm really sad, because Windows Phone 8.1 was a really good OS, and Nokia made good and beautiful phones. But Microsoft never seemed to care much about the OS; they didn't market it well, and some basic functionality was missing five years in, when they were quite advanced at the beginning.

I think they did care, they just couldn't get it right. Just look how horribly buggy w10m has been despite months of patching and bug fixing.

They made some conscious and poor design choices in w10m. They decided to copy Android in a bunch of weird ways, too many notifications and inconsistent keyboard behavior.

12 reasons WP died.
Ms-Nokia actively sabotaged/tripped WP on every step.
1. Charging $100 yearly developer fee was crazy. ESP since they were the incumbent and Google was charging a one-time fee of $49 if memory serves me.
2. MS decision not to allow sideloading of apps basically killed their chances outside US, UK, Germany... - places without cheap broadband.
Even IOS allowed for apps to be downloaded on a computer.
Many of my potential WP converts ran to Android for this very reason.
AFAIK, MS has issues increasing Store usage on Win10 in my country because store apps installation files can't be stored offline.
3. API limitations - if the initial developer fee put a nail on the coffin. This was the hammer that drove it home. A lot of developers simply quit and focused on android. The few who persisted habitually wrote messages like, "...feature cannot be done due to a limitation in the OS"
4. Speed - if Bill was in charge, WP would be hale & hearty right now. Ballmer and his people took their sweet time before adding new features - as if they were competing with resourceless startups or stagnant giants. Thousands of feature requests flooded Nokia forum, the ln user voice - only for a handful to be added a year and six months later. E.g. Notification area, file manager, folders, led notification, wifi direct
5. Apple worship - IMO WP was Microsoft's first attempt to out-Apple Apple on design. Win8 was the second and Surface was the third.
They forgot to notice that Apple never copied blindly - copying the spirit of a design or feature - Apple STOLE.
Since WP, win8..10 all that matters to Ms is looks and pays lip service usability & productivity.
6. Nokia released too many phones with nonsensical, confusing naming. They released flagships with 2 year old processors. And randomly removed features available in low range phones from high/mid range phones and vice versa.
7. Nokia att exclusives killed more sales than they would ever know.
8. Ms/Nokia focused too much on the US market. In fact, Ms behaves as if only US market exists. Cortana spent more than a year as a US exclusive.
Till today, some Bing features are US only.
9. Marketing - MS simply didn't market the OS. Nokia - a hardware partner did 100x more marketing than ever MS.
10. Selling the OS - selling the OS free for the first 2 years would have bought them many partners esp since Android was free.
11. Platform reboot - wp7, wp8, Wp8.1, wp10. Every reboot inflicted a deep wound on fans, OEMs and the OS.
This reboot issue plagues Skype as well. I remember at least 4 reboots of skype on WP.
12. Nadella - he buried WP.

Thanks for the write up, I fully agree.
Ad 12: the current management has little clue and no technical knowledge, they are milking Windows and Office, until its too late. They fired their QA departments - their products are getting more and more buggy (e.g. a Top500 company canceled the WinPhone10 plan as the phone address book showed random profile photos from unrelated Exchange contacts - wtf). Beside enterprise and public sector, they already burned down their brands. They lost the younger generations because of pure ignorance and incompetence, Generations X and Y look elsewhere - ChromeBook/Mac, iOS/Android and GoogleDocs/Pages.

What's really sad is how they took Nokia down in flames with them. I'm really looking forward to seeing HMD Global rise Nokia out of the ashes - the new 3310 is a great start but without 3G/4G LTE support is DOA. Lots of countries don't even have the old 2G spectrums anymore. That being said, if I was Samsung i'd be very concerned about the new Android powered Nokia phones hitting the market.

Nokia's management made a horribly bad choice in choosing Windows over Android. It's 100 percent their fault.

You can read the full story: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Elop#Early_leadership_...
Stephen Elop is now an infamous business book case. He was a Microsoft manager, than a trajan horse as Nokia CEO who burned their main platforms, shifted to WinPhone, de-valued Nokia, MS bought the Nokia devision, MS burned the devision ... read the article, btw Nokia was the biggest phone and smartphone (Symbian) manufacturer back then.

If you're assigning blame, don't forget Nokia's board of directors at that time, who elected Elop and started that whole mess.

Choosing Android would not have saved them. Google didn't like Nokia and would've given new OS versions to other companies first. Nokia had to buy most of the components from Android phone manufacturers - Samsung, LG, Sony. They stood no chance.
They were doomed by the Symbian technical debt. When the iPhone came out, a very smart person posted a comment on HN saying Nokia is dead and he was right I guess :)

Unless you can predict the future you have no proof that it would have saved them or not. But, one thing is certain - by choosing to exclusively go with Windows Phone they sealed their demise.
Also, your accusation that Google didn't like Nokia is also baseless and your explanation is bizarre.

Why did google dislike Nokia?

I have no idea why I keep hearing doom and gloom over the lack of 3G/4G on the new 3310 when it's marketed towards countries where the original 3310 isn't an uncommon second phone...

Precisely because it limits it to specific markets you mentioned. The new 3310 got a ton of press in the US/AU/EU etc and lots of people like myself would love to buy one as a second phone. In a lot of places such as Singapore the 2G network is already phased out. It's a huge missed opportunity.

how is it different from any other Nokia feature phone? i still don't get what's so special about this 3310 compared to other legendary cheap models of Nokia which they produced in recent years like 1100, except ripoff name

Aside from the lack of security from the 2G networks, not to mention the worse quality call, it is very likely that 2G will be phase out during the next decade in many countries.
This will render the phone utterly useless.

I thought there was an anouncement. I had Nokias all my life and my two first smartphones were Windows Phone and I was pretty happy about it. I still prefer WP "tile" UI, better use of space and informative home screen. Especially for my use case, as I don't like handling tens of apps and 95% of my use was email, browser, Whatsapp, podcasts, online banking, and Twitter.
But then Microsoft effectively announced it quit. After MS signaled it, you could see even the biggest companies (Facebook and Twitter, my bank) started to neglect their WP apps. So that was the end.
Now my third smartphone is a Moto G4 Android. I still prefer the 'tile' UI, but I am changing my user profile. I use many more apps now, like Reddit and an app for a brazilian website. Not essential, but ok. But having the newest features early on Whatsapp and a proper banking app are a much better experience.

There are Windows 10 launchers for Android that are decent. Not exactly the same, but you might like it more than I did.

Well, you can't have revenue if you have nothing to sell.
No new phones + removing old ones from stores means no sells.

That's what I can't understand. Why even buy Nokia if there was no intention of continuing to manufacture phones a few years later? If they had released three new phones (low end, mid tier, flagship) in February 2017 they would have at least kept up with previous earnings. If the flagship model (and perhaps even the mid tier) were released as the rumored "Surface" models and specced appropriately, they would likely have seen a small increase initially and greater sales as the year goes on.
Instead, we get more advertising and less privacy than before, in Windows 10 on the desktop. I'm done, Microsoft.

I wonder if they aren't hoping to leverage React Native's growth to expand the platform's app offerings (eventually).
The real problem is that innovation in the mobile space has just stagnated. It was a 10-year explosive all-in from Apple and Google and the winners are kinda just in place now. The industry happened very quickly. I don't see a compelling reason for consumers to jump ship unless something big actually comes about (why would they?)

I don't understand it, there should be a customer base for managed rather than BYOD devices where a Microsoft device should be mandatory, as per Blackberry in earlier times. Although not a huge market compared to the mainstream iOS/Android world this market could make enough money to support three or four devices that do a good job of running Microsoft things.
Such devices need not be marketed as 'phones' but more as 'Pocket Office', so you have a gadget that completely connects you to work doing things like Office and Outlook properly, a deluxe experience. Remote desktop should also be a thing so your 'Pocket Office' can be just another desktop window, with Synergy style copy and paste. It would not have been that hard for them to have got that seamless experience right, to not care about regular phone apps and just deliver the experience their corporate customers would want, with endpoints of their network fully locked down.
Surface has proven that MS can sell decent hardware to companies, they should have done the same with the phone even if the market was to be a new 'Pocket Office' one rather than a 'smartphone' one.

Microsoft has always been just a mediocre software company led by salesmen. Their extraordinary success on the desktop depended too much on being in the right place at the right time. That serendipity didn't happen for them with phones and likely won't happen again for anything else. They must compete with the other companies on merit, and they will do so with great mediocrity. Plus, they now are getting a taste of their own medicine in having to compete with companies that are entrenched, which may not always be better technically but have the momentum going for them.

... and no one really noticed. Microsoft could do the sensible thing and sell Android phones.

So Microsoft went to all that trouble to make Windows look like a phone screen, forcing an inappropriate AI onto laptops and desktops, then blew it in the phone business.
How's Microsoft's "Surface" thing doing?

> How's Microsoft's "Surface" thing doing?
Recent iterations of Microsoft's Surface tablets seem to be doing well [0]:
In those early days, the Surface was looking less like an Xbox-style home run for Microsoft, and more a Zune -like fiasco.
But that's all ancient history -- call it the Ballmerzoic Era. The 2014 Surface Pro 3 became what Microsoft always hoped it would be: the flagship device for touch computing on Windows, the go-to alternative for those who wanted both a tablet and a laptop without feeling shortchanged on either front. The Surface Pro 4 refines the hardware formula even further, and with Windows 10 on board rather than Windows 8, the platform's final big compromise evaporates too. Now, the Surface line is the design leader: Apple's upcoming iPad Pro and Google's Pixel C tablets are the ones aping Microsoft's design, adding snap-on keyboards and ramping up the multitasking chops of their touch-first operating systems.
[0] https://www.cnet.com/uk/products/microsoft-surface-pro-4/rev...

I had Windows phones for a few years - Windows 7 & 8. I moved to Android with a Nexus 5X, but still had fond memories of Windows phone. It was a limited but snappy little platform.
My Pixel is off for repair at the moment so I've had to revert to the Lumia 735. I've upgraded it to Windows 10. It's awful.
The UI is sluggish, apps take over 30 seconds to load in some cases (Messenger and Whatsapp being key culprits), and it just generally feels counter-intuitive to use. I'm hating every second of using it.

Mobile is an obvious existential threat to Microsoft.

I think in a few years you could have a mobile phone transformed into a notebook, like the Microsoft Surface but smaller. In this context Windows phones can get some traction again.
Indeed I think it is possible right now but nobody is offering a good transformation. There is a company that is promising this but until today never launched the product.

I always thought if MS can make Windows Phone run Android apps in a seamless way, there's hope for it.

They tried to and gave up; the subsystem that runs Linux user mode programs originated from that work though.

I wonder if Microsoft is a welcome competitor in those domains where they don't have any monopolistic advantage. They will help you avoid any anti-trust issues, while also being too sluggish/dysfunctional to actually execute.

I had assumed Microsoft had given up on its phone ambitions, so was surprised to see a Microsoft phone product placement while watching the new movie "Get Out" last night.

I knew people in Redmond who were working on mobile in 1995. Being first is not always a good thing.

And in one simple meme:
[1]: http://s2.quickmeme.com/img/37/37b0641f1cb0ae77dc9b8fc8c8458...

Very good! I can cross off a platform from the stuff to learn list.

Ballmer's "me too!" but always late for the party legacy.

Late? Windows Mobile pre-dates iOS by 5 years.
It's interesting that their first attempts were shrinking desktop Windows UI to work on a phone. That failed so they came up with a phone UI and expanded it to work on the desktop. What's the third act?

Yes but Windows Mobile was awful, the reason Apple did so well with the iPhone was that the rest of the industry had stagnated.

It was the same as all Microsoft products, it was aimed at businesses primarily where they could leverage all the features that come with a Microsoft domain e.g. Exchange integration. I worked at a Housing Association (UK) and we issued all our tradesmen with Windows Mobile smartphones. They received & completed all their jobs via a custom app we wrote for it, all pre iPhone.
Microsoft has never been a company that targets consumers directly in my opinion, they're a company that targets business first and foremost and due to network effects they effectively got most of the consumer desktop market as well.

I guess we can call the mobile market "Revenge of the Consumers" - "No, Microsoft, F--k you."
While most people just accept the OS that comes on a PC if they buy one, I don't think they were too anxious to repeat the experience when they clearly had other choices.

"The experience" - starting with the constant pop-up nagware, moving on to the dismal performance, following with the whack-a-mole update of the week "thrills", etc.

Late? Windows Mobile pre-dates iOS by 5 years.
So what's their excuse for failing?

> What's the third act?
Hopefully exit the OS business altogether and focus on Office. I kid, of course, but a man can dream.

I always thought MSFT should've taken the Zune, stick a cellular radio in it, and call that Windows Phone.

They did: Windows Phone 7 was basically a Zune with a cellular radio

Still a few years too late :(

Microsoft had/have an excellent mobile OS and Windows phones available and was gaining traction. All the promise of UWP and integration between W10 and the Band and WP and Xbox and so on disappeared under Satya, not Ballmer. The Band is the most bizarre deprecation for me, seeing as there's still nothing on the market which does everything it did.

> The Band is the most bizarre deprecation for me
Why? They didn't sell.

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