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You can't force people to release an app, but you can incent them. Conduct market research to find out which missing services are the blocking factors for people to switch. Then approach those companies and guarantee a minimum revenue from WP. If the app makes less, Microsoft will make up the difference. Lend Microsoft engineers to those companies. Or contract it out and have Microsoft pay the bill. Or let Microsoft use public APIs to build third-party apps for those services. Don't take a 30% cut of the money users pay, temporarily.

There were many things Microsoft could do, but it seems they weren't fully committed to the platform.

A company I used to work for was offered $100k to release a Windows Phone version of their app, but they declined (because they'd be responsible for maintenance)

They did that.

TheVerge reported them paying up to $100,000 to companies to port their apps to the store.

https://www.theverge.com/2013/6/15/4433082/microsoft-paying-...

That was back in 2013. Foursquare was one of those - MS covered the cost of porting it to WP. They even hired an outside developer team to do it.

Thanks, I didn't know that.

> The biggest blow was google not giving them anything.

I wonder why they did that? Oh yeah, it's exactly like Microsoft not "giving" anything to the Linux desktop, ever.

yes, its exactly like that. why help the competition?

ahem.

Visual Studio Code. Web Core Fonts.

"ever" is a strong word.

Come on, don't give me that. Fonts were literally ripped from the MS download site, they were never packaged or promoted to the Linux world, they couldn't even be redistributed. And VS Code is a tool for developers, mostly aimed at the Mac crowd, released in 2015, almost 20 years after KDE and more than 15 since GNOME started. VSC has nothing to do with the Linux desktop.

Microsoft fought the Linux desktop at every step and they are still fighting it, conscious that Office exclusivity is a key tool in keeping the enterprise and public-sector markets as their main cash cows. They opened to Linux-running developers just enough to promote their cloud strategy, but they will never do anything that could potentially endanger their desktop monopoly.

The fonts were not 'literally ripped'. The license could have stipulated "you must not ever use this on anything other than Microsoft Windows", but they didn't. They did not make it easy to put in linux distributions, but they did make it possible.

VSCode is indeed part of their cloud strategy. I do not for a moment claim that they did anything benevolent for linux desktop experience -- nor do I expect them to do anything especially for Linux (on the contrary, I expect them to try to kill it).

And still, all I objected was to your use of the word "ever", since VSCode is actually packaged for the linux desktop, and is, IMHO, at the moment the best IDE on linux for quite a few languages.

> It seems silly now that they'd see WP as a threat at all

It seems silly now partly because they fought it back then. Microsoft had their fare share of blunders, but they would have likely done better if Google did not act -- possibly much better.

> MS released a great yt app for about a week and google changed the T&CS of their API and issued a take down (or maybe even blocked the app) because MS was suddenly in violation, even though their own ios and android apps also were.

That's not what happened. MS's app was always in violation of Google's terms of service, and google indeed blocked them -- but there was no "sudden" violation. MS was using the same API that Google was, except it wasn't a public one -- and MS did not display ads on that app, a condition that Google actively enforced on every 3rd party YT app.

Yes, Google's iOS and Android apps used Google's non-public API, and the iOS app at the time did not display ads (the android one did). So? I do not know what kind of agreement Apple and Google had in place at the time, not was one made public -- it is possible that Apple paid for the no-ad experience, and it is possible that Google forgo iOS ad revenue in return for access to iOS users. Whatever - Microsoft was in no position to demand favorable treatment with respect to YouTube, but they gave it to themselves anyway (and suffered Google's hand as a result). Google never was under an obligation to give all 3rd parties the same API they use themselves.

One should also note that the website version of YouTube was perfectly serviceable on iPhones and Androids at the time, but was horrible on Windows Phone because the MS browser was not implementing neither standards or de-facto standards at the time; if MS invested in a reasonable moble browser (or allowed 3rd party ones), their users would likely have had a reasonable YouTube experience.

Another thing that happened more or less at the same time, which I am sure is intimately related: Microsoft asserted patents to make Google pay to make Exchange protocol available on gmail accounts, and threatening Android manufacturers left and right on infringements. Then, more or less a week after Windows Phone came out, an capitalized on the Exchange protocol (everything else wasn't as well implemented or executed -- but who cares, Gmail, Exchange and outlook supported it), Google announced that "due to Microsoft's licensing fees, users of the free tier of Gmail will no longer get Exchange protocol on a new device" -- meaning that no Windows Phone user could get a proper gmail experience on their phone. Microsoft immediately replied with "no no no, please, have it free for all users", but Google did not change their stance.

Microsoft made the bed, completely on their own.