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I was going to chime in a little on it being a stretch. One of the promotions for students they did was near the summer of 2012 or 2013. The promotion was you got paid 100 dollars for every app published on the Microsoft store limit 5 for the mobile store and 5 for the regular store. So a total limit of $1000. My school actually had a Microsoft rep run a workshop over a weekend showing students how to publish an app on the store. He gave us a template for a number of apps to "test" with. I made about $300 that weekend by publishing 3 different variants of a wackamole game. The workshop I attended had about 25 students total and we all left publishing at least one app. Idk how wide spread this outreach was. I checked on my apps sometime last year and they were all still up. I ended up pulling them out of a mix of shame and embarrassment.

Did everything they could...

Ah, yes. $100 per app. I'm sure that's what most apps cost to produce. /s

It seems like they did a few things, but never actually, you know, paid app developers to build out their ecosystem.

Hey, if you're optimizing for "number of apps on our store" I bet it worked great!

Why spend $100,000 developing something one app when you could get 1000 for the same price?!

Instead of paying per app, would make more sense to let devs keep 90% of store revenue, which would incentivize the development of apps that are actually popular and make money.

Hell, let developers keep 100% of store revenue, at least until you have a customer base.

It's not much worse for MS than 90%, and it makes a much nicer marketing story if you're trying to convince developers to get on your platform.

It was a slight eye opener for me as a student at the time getting near graduation. The part of the workshop going through the app submittal and approval process was actually really interesting, but when it became clear that the bigger effort was to boost app numbers in the store things felt really dirty.

Either way that experience always comes up for me whenever people talk about the low quality of apps on the Windows store.

> "We have millions more apps than the competition."

> leaves out the fact that 99% of them are either web wrappers or low quality games

This is why we have confounding factors, kids.

Even with paying out this money for shovelware they never matched up to Apple's app store numbers.

I had a Surface Pro 3 at the time and there were maybe 10 apps worth using on a touchscreen. Eventually gave up and sold it to get a Mac and iPad.

They tried that too. The Verge reported in 2013 that Microsoft was paying some developers $100,000 each to port their apps to Windows Mobile. The article hints that was how Pandora & Temple Run ended up on Windows Mobile.

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

That's probably where those ads on Craigslist coding gigs come from.

"I'll pay you $100 or split the equity for my cool new app idea!"

That certainly wasn't the only program. MSFT paid cost for my mobile dev company to port games, because we had an established brand on iOS/Android. $100 for whatever random college students come up with seems very reasonable.

This is unfortunately true, but it isn't representative of the entire effort put forth to acquire apps. I was part of the Microsoft org who was doing this at the time. We were split between breadth engagements (one to many like at universities or hackathons) and depth engagements (one to one). I was working depth engagements helping established companies port existing iOS and Android apps to Windows. The amount of investment from Microsoft in those depth engagements ranged from me helping out with technical barriers for a couple days to hundreds of thousands of dollars in incentives and development effort. It was all about how desirable that name or brand was on other platforms.

I was a student who had won a Lumia 800 around May of 2012. There was a promotion where anyone who submitted 4 apps to the appstore would get a phone - no 'win' involved, a guaranteed phone. It was one of the best promotions I'd ever seen, and I promptly churned out 4 soundboard apps in a week.

Agreed. The parent post reads like "the overwhelming numbers of our competitors beat poor Microsoft despite our talent, ability and courage!"

No, Microsoft beat Microsoft. It was their game to lose.

It was their game to lose ten years ago, but only barely and not recently. In 2007 when the iPhone was launched, Windows Mobile had about 40% of the smartphone market, RIM had about 20%. But the smartphone market was nothing compared to today, the vast majority of phones were feature phones. Nokia's array of candybar phones absolutely dominated in 2007, with the Moto Razr was still big. Then Apple unveiled the iPhone, and the guys at Android said, "Oh shit." Meanwhile Steve Ballmer said the iPhone would never succeed. Ballmer drove MS into the ground. Everyone pivoted to the iPhone model except MS, who spit out WinMo 6.5 in 2009, and finally WinMo 7 in 2010. By 2010, the race was pretty much over. The rest of what MS did was half-assed at best.

You're 100% right, MS beat MS.

And frankly Winmo 7 was the bad move, not 6.5.

Because 7 burned the app bridge with 6.5, thus making it ever easier for someone to justify moving to a different platform.

Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

> Never mind that at launch iphone was more fancy featurephone than smartphone.

Not really. iPhone was the first phone ever that shipped with a real, full-featured, non-crippled web browser. This was an astonishing achievement at the time, and one which made its existing competition look like "fancy featurephones," not the reverse. (Really an astonishing achievement period, considering it had 128MB of RAM).

http://mobilehtml5.org/ I'm interested in how you would define full-featured. Please check the symbian & opera columns. Also, iOS 1.0 ships with Safari3.0, not Safari3.1.1 in this test.

In iOS 2.0 they introduced a new feature that allows you to save web pictures to Photos. Full-feature redefined. :)

Edit: a full-featured television indeed, by Alan Kay's definition: https://www.fastcompany.com/40435064/what-alan-kay-thinks-ab...

I mean full-featured in the sense of end user experience. If you have any example prior to 2007 of a mobile browser rendering the full New York Times website perfectly,[1] I'm all ears. But as I remember the below link was, for good reason, the biggest "wow" moment of any demo Steve Jobs ever gave.

[1] https://youtu.be/RIRQg8AJxuw?t=41m24s

I partially agree with you, in that the rendering of the page is good-looking in circa 2007 standard on a mobile device. But rendering one page nicely does not prove it is full-featured. It has to go through some kind of benchmark, which reflects the general ability to process trillions of other pages out there. It loses to Opera Mobile or Symbian browser on the test I just googled (not sure about how accurate it is though).

A full-fledged browser experience in 2007 to me means at least I could have mouse hover, to deal with sites not yet adapting to mobile computing (there were a lot of them). WM6 browsers did that. If it fails, I'd go and use my Palm device to VNC into my workstation -- a 2004 Sony device that will be up-to-date forever because it is a decent thin client.

I also remember opera mini being a very handy browser on lower end phones like the S40 models. Since the first iOS safari does not do javascript IIRC, it makes no difference if the rendering is done with WebKit locally, or pre-computed on a server. The only difference is that iPhone has a bigger viewport, which allows you to consider the webpage a minified version of the desktop rendering -- and you are able to freely swipe, zoom, rotate -- not relating to the functionality of the browser itself. I'm not sure if you would agree, but I think, if iPhone1 runs Opera Mobile (with beefy 128MB RAM and fancy graphics chip), it beats the built-in Safari to the ground.

Of course it will cause other troubles -- battery life, thermal management, slow startup, or even unstability etc. This is, to my understanding, why Apple decided to ship a "reduced" version of Safari3.

Edit: adding explainations.

iOS Safari has always supported Javascript and was never "reduced" in any meaningful way (that's the point of Jobs' demo) except that (as now) it didn't support Flash, and deliberately ignored onmouseover, :hover and other such features that don't work well with a touchscreen interface.

Screw mouse hover. iOS had the mind blowing pinch to zoom feature which made full page websites actually readable on mobile. They didn't even have to wait for mobile friendly. If you tried browsing the web on any phone pre-iOS it was a shit experience fraught with frustration.

Exactly. I was referring to exactly this, that it is the awesome interaction methods that made it work, not the browser itself.

But no 3rd party apps. That was an after thought.

> But no 3rd party apps. That was an after thought.

Barely any platform had 3rd party apps. No one had a streamlined app store, SDK and monetization process like iOS came out with in 2008.

Palm Had. I was a fool not to try and develop a 3rd party app for it. I had a Palm.

Absolutely not, it was added on after, but no, that was the plan all along. You don't build that in just a year. That was part of the plan all along, but why waste millions of dollars on an app ecosystem before the phone itself is proven? No, you start with an amazing minimum viable product, see if it succeeds, and if so, you recoup lots of R&D money, and pour that into building the app system you already planned out. Yes, Jobs talked about web-apps and such, but that was just cover.

Yes, Walter Isaacson said that others tried to convince Steve about apps at launch, but from the moment he started talking about web apps on that stage in 2007, I never believed for a moment it was really the angle. I knew a couple folks who worked on the first couple revs of iOS, installable apps were always possible, if underdeveloped, from day one. Jobs had lots of resources at Apple in the 80s, and frittered them away on the Lisa and Apple III. He stumbled on Pixar, not knowing where it would go, and had a hell of a time figuring out how to position NeXT, but all those failures taught him that in business, like in art (and we know he felt himself an artist), making the most within the constraints of the medium is they key to success. He came back to Apple on its deathbed. He negotiated with MS for a transfusion to stay alive, and knew even though OS9 sucked, they needed a splash. They had the iMac. Pare down a personal computer to what was needed at the time. Monitor, modem/ethernet, CD drive. No need for a floppy, they're dying, chuck it for an external one you can charge for. No need to pack it with a super spiffy CPU or oodles of RAM, people can pay for an upgrade. Just make it slick looking and work well. Same with the iPod. Pimp it out with upgrades later, after the MVP proves its worth. The G4 cube failed, it never was really iterated on.

He learned from Microsoft, create a MVP, if it seems to catch on, iterate fast.

I assume the iphone was "more fancy featurephone" due to the lack of 3rd party apps?

I would have to disagree with that statement. Windows Mobile and BlackBerry allowed 3rd party apps to be installed, but they were both difficult to find and didn't usually add anything beneficial to the phones at the time. Users, for the most part, stuck to what was installed on the phone and that was it. Smartphones were defined by the fact they had an email client and a (relative to the time) high-resolution screen to read and write emails on.

It was a different market in 2007. The idea that a successful smartphone required an app ecosystem was unheard of.

Don't confuse the lack of modern mobile apps with any mobile apps. There was a thriving ecosystem around mobile apps at the time. Not only Windows Mobile and Blackberry but Symbian too, which I believe was the largest, and Treo.

There were many companies living on this stuff. Mobile data was still very expensive, which didn't change for a few more years, and touchscreens were small and crappy. So the market was mostly business logic and CRM apps because they were the ones that could afford it.

That changed when mobile data and big screens became cheap enough for consumers, but I think Apple was as confused about that as everyone else given the state of early iPhones.

I worked for a company in 2006 that was considering writing phone apps (we already had a bunch of Windows apps). At the time, each phone company wanted to "curate" the apps for their own phone stores. At least one company wanted, for each $10 app, about $11 of revenue. The result: we decided that it would be essentially impossible to ever make money from phone apps.

What the iPhone did was genius: they created demand for the phone, but would only sell through phone companies willing to let Apple control the app market. That made all the difference: all of sudden, a developer could make an app and have it show up to bazillions of people.

[disclaimer: I currently work for Microsoft, but not in the phone team. But I do have apps in the Microsoft app store!]

The problem with WP was that it was late and offered nothing very special to consumers over android/iOS (and ya, I loved my 920). Consumers had no reason to buy it, developers had no reason to dev for it, a huge vicious circle that would have been difficult to break under the best of circumstances. The war was lost when the WinMo 7 team decided to after Blackberry in 2007, ignoring the iPhone as consequential, requiring that dev/design reset later that was just too late.

Man the more comments I read the more I begin to remember. There was ONE dev who was churning out VERY high quality apps to popular platforms. I think Snapchat or Instagram was what he got known for. Instead of MS embracing his work and helping it flourish, they let him get taken down by a C&D.

LOTS of people got heated when that happened.

Rudy Hyn

That’s the one

>Had Microsoft put quality dev teams on building high quality third-party apps I think the chances of success would have greatly improved.

For one app? For an app they would have to give away for free? For an app that would always be behind the FB built ios/android apps?

On the other hand, if all WP has is half-baked clones of better apps on Android/iOS, there's even less incentive to switch over.

If they were serious about growing the user base and building these apps internally was their only course of action (seems like it was) then it should have been taking more seriously (assuming parent is spot on here, I have no idea really.)

You have to consider this in the context at the time. Yes it would have been expensive, but Microsoft was investing BILLIONS into Windows Phone. Microsoft and partners spent something like $700 million dollars just on marketing for the launch of Windows Phone 7[1,2].

To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish. And I am not saying they should have done this for only one app. I am saying they should have done this for many apps. If they had created quality versions of, say, the top 25 apps for mobile at the time they would have been in a much better position. I believe they could have made significant traction with business users. Remember, at the time Office wasn't available on other platforms and was (is) a huge draw for many people.

If they had been successful with the strategy and gained market share the partners would have wanted to take over their own apps anyway to enable monetization. But they needed users for that and to get users they needed apps. You have to jump start it somehow.

Now, would it have made any difference? Who knows. But IMO, you either need to not do it or you need to do all parts of it right. You can't go half way on the ecosystem and expect to succeed in an already challenging market.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/microsoft-half-billion-dol... 2: https://techcrunch.com/2012/01/04/microsoft-oems-pledging-20...

    To spend that kind of money on marketing and then not dedicate resources to the actual product seems foolish.

Sounds like a Hollywood strategy to me. Overadvertise a stinker to try to recoup your investment.

That works for movies because they're trying to maximize the number of people who are interested enough to go see it once, more or less. A successful phone ecosystem requires building something that people want to use over the medium term.

And the expense and commitment of buying a phone is much greater than the cost of taking a chance on the Bearded Lady.

but marketing was always a core M$ strength. it's been a standard criticism of the company for a very long time.

They were great at getting their OS preinstalled on nearly every PC. They were really good at backwards compatibility, and they were absolutely ruthless against their competition. But they always, always sucked at marketing.

you don't view "getting their OS preinstalled on nearly every PC" as marketing?

Nope. Windows 95 had a huge promotion, but most PCs already came with the OS installed, unless you built your own PC.

> the top 25 apps for mobile at the time

This list keeps changing every month. Remember Pokemon Go?

6 million daily active users remember Pokémon Go and spent $1B on it in 2016.

They did manage to get many of the top 50 apps to their platform, however, top 50 isn't enough. When all your friends have the latest and greatest on their iOS and Android and you have to wait a year or two for a WP port you get tired of that. Plus there are many industry-specific and workplace apps that never made it to WP. You can only face so many let downs in the app store before you give up on a platform. Nokia did make some damn good hardware though.

For a small number of core apps. If they have invested heavily and put their best engineers to work on high quality core apps like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Messenger etc (maybe it would be 15-20 apps 90% of people install on their phones), they would have had a much better shot at gaining momentum.

Other smaller apps would have followed and been made by independent developers but you need to cover the apps almost everybody is using and make them comparable feature and quality/performance wise to iOS and Android versions.

Number one thing most people do on their new phone is download Facebook/Messenger/Twitter. If those apps suck they will immediately have a very bad impression and will switch back to iOS or Android as soon as they get a chance.

Usage numbers for FB are not that far behind IE. Perhaps they should have invested a proportional amount.

This was the strategy that Apple followed when OS X first came out.

Third party developers were moving slowly (or not at all) so Apple started developing and giving away (or selling) apps that showed off what you could do with the new platform.

They developed Safari when Microsoft lost interest in further development of Internet Explorer. The iLife suite had iTunes, iCal, iMovie, iPhoto, iDVD, iWeb and GarageBand. The iWork suite had Numbers, Pages, and Keynote. They created (or bought) professional apps like Logic Pro, Final Cut, Shake, Motion and Aperture.

If you have a new platform and third party developers don't step up, then you need to start filling those holes yourself in a way that shows off your platform's advantages, and keep at it.

Not just one app. They would need Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Twitter, and a number of other staple apps.

Intead they staffed their quality dev team on the Windows Mail app and Skype...