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 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.

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.