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Comment by tuyiown | Hacker News Reader

> I still do not understand how Microsoft, considering their extensive experience in operating system development, somehow managed to lose their entire, massive mobile device market share in the course of only a couple of years.

Maybe because the iPhone actually delivered much much more that was already available on windows mobile ?

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Even if the iPhone delivered much more than what was already available on Windows Mobile (doubtful, considering that Microsoft's software was years of development ahead, functionality-wise), it's still incomprehensible to me why a company as massively experienced as Microsoft did not react as quickly as possible by copying iPhone features to improve Windows Mobile, but instead delayed their time-to-market for years by going the Windows Phone route.

Probably, it was not Apple's ingenuity that won the battle, but Microsoft's stupidity not to improve their product ASAP that lost the battle.

You're talking about the biggest IT company which in 2006 was redesigning their whole big boy Windows.

Ballmer was deriding the iPhone by not having a keyboard, therefore being just a gimmick not worth of being a work device.

Plus, probably in 2007 having access a capacitive touch screens was most likely not so simple as today. The availability was limited. Plus, the apps were designed around having a physical keyboard and buttons available.

You need to take in consideration that big corporations are more often slow, bureaucratic, in decision paralysis and having in control people that are managers, not innovators. Microsoft is one of these from time to time, it is a pendulum swing. Steve Balmer was a marketing guy, not an innovator like Steve Jobs. If you look closely, being an innovator is not the path to success, Steve jobs was fired by a bureaucrat (and the board) at Apple, Elon Musk caught a lot of flak at all times, etc. The cancer of incompetent managers is a recurring plague in companies and generalized in governments, that's life.

There are exceptions, but they are not the rule.

Internal politics + bean counters at the wheels.

the original iPhone had no 3G (only Edge supported), no copy-paste, no app store (by design!), no MMS. Edit: and most likely no enterprise directory integration (Exchange et al)

BUT it felt the most futuristic piece of technology money could buy, and the high price point made it a luxury good that stood out of the Blackberries and Windows phones.

I like to think it was bought by CEOs and CTOs and executives who forced their IT dept. to support them because they were just so damn cool.

At the time, it felt to me like the first big iPhone user cohort was iPod power-users. I seem to remember business users dismissing it as a gimmick because of the lack of keyboard, wifi, and apps. That's only my personal recollection, though, I have no actual data.

I think that's what the OP is saying. It's like Microsoft had a 2 mile lead in a marathon, but still ended up coming last.

three words: user experience design. Windows designs tools and Apple designs experiences for its users. This is coming from someone who has only owned a G4 laptop from Apple. Im not a huge consumer of their ecosystem.

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