Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
I stayed with WP all the way up to WP10 until last year when I finally switched away.
I was happy to put up with having fewer apps back in 2010 because I liked the OS so much, but more recently it felt like they just stopped innovating and the lack of apps is much more of an issue today in 2017.
I think Microsoft could have done more to make WP10 more attractive to users, but at the end of the day because of decisions made (primarily by Apple) to limit functionality of universal web apps and in turn creating OS specific ecosystems, they were forced to fight against a almost insurmountable network effect either way.
It's a shame because this seems to be the fate of many tech innovations.
They came out later and really managed to hit a bright spot in between the customizability of Android and the sleekness of iOS.
But without the deep app ecosystem backing them up, I'm not sure we're going to see any new players emerge in this current form factor of mobile computing.
So far we've seen:
- Amazon fail - Microsoft fail - Facebook fail (killed internally)
All fail at providing anything like a competitive answer to Android and iOS dominance.
What I see are all the big players lining up to take a crack at Augmented Reality when the tech hits a sweet spot sometime in the next 5-10 years. That's the reason for the crazy investments in MagicLeap, etc. it's a bet on being able to muscle into the absolutely massive mobile ecosystem.