It'd be challenging to try to sell handset manufacturers a WinMo license to compete with Apple (who makes money from HW and only more recently apps/subscription services) when Google was giving Android away for free to the same handset manufacturers. Even historically low margin Amazon gave up on the Fire phone.
Additionally smartphones are a very visible consumer facing product and thus very visible from an anti-trust populism perspective. [1] Imagine Steve Ballmer testifying in congress like Zuckerberg, Cook, Dorsey, etc. - he would totally have bungled it.
That said for consumers (rather than MSFT shareholders) a triopoly is for sure better than a duopoly.
[1] Bill Gates thinks Windows Mobile would have beaten Android without Microsoft’s antitrust woes https://www.theverge.com/2019/11/6/20952370/bill-gates-windo...
Microsoft’s (enterprise) customers weren’t ready for the cloud back then. They could have made a bid for the rest of the market, but I’m not sure the rest of the market wanted Microsoft.
I wouldn’t even say Azure is playing catch up to AWS. Azure is a strong second as far as marketshare. It also has a company behind it that knows enterprise and knows how to cater to it. Technologically, I can’t think of a single enterprise/startup need it couldn’t meet.
MS’s developer tools have always been great.
Yes, I realize that this is a “Nixon goes to China” post.
Winning in mobile is a Pyrrhic victory for Google. It came out in the Oracle trial that Google only made a $27 billion profit on Android from 2010-2016. Google gives more than half that much per year to Apple to be the default search engine. Losing mobile was the best thing that could have happened to MS.
It let them concentrate on being everywhere.
Article from 2007 :
> Of course, the discussion included the upcoming Apple iPhone and Mr. Ballmer had a few funny things to say about the device.
>> It's sort of a funny question. Would I trade 96% of the market for 4% of the market? (Laughter.) I want to have products that appeal to everybody. Now we'll get a chance to go through this again in phones and music players. There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60% or 70% or 80% of them, than I would to have 2% or 3%, which is what Apple might get.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/steve-ballmerwindows-mobile-60...
I had used various PDAs and mobile phones that had Internet access (of a sort) back then. Generally speaking, they had very tiny screens, a poor or nonexistent touchscreen, grossly underpowered processors with insufficient RAM, a cut-down network stack, and a crappy "browser". The best pre-iPhone experience (that I experienced) was the Moto Q, running Windows CE, which actually had WiFi and a almost tolerable text browser.
I won't even talk about WAP and WML and how well all that worked.
Compare that to the debut iPhone. Much larger capacitive touchscreen, smooth scrolling, pinch zoom / expand and more. You went to regular desktop websites, and they just worked. Then you see all the effort put into the UI for the address book and other apps, and that all adds up to a user experience quite unlike anything else at the time. Revolutionary. A better experience than even the Windows CE handheld PDAs.
They probably all missed this because the executive class all used Blackberry's (Google executives and Microsoft executives) which is another "also ran" in the business. I agree with your point about mobile browsers. No one ever putting much of any effort into supporting fast rendering of html or javascript much less AJAX in the web browser applications and feature phones all used something other than HTML like WAP. The best a user could hope for was a phone with a fast web proxy that performed the rendering like Opera Mini.
> Opera Software pioneered with its Small Screen Rendering (SSR) and Medium Screen Rendering (MSR) technology. The Opera web browser is able to reformat regular web pages for optimal fit on small screens and medium-sized (PDA) screens. It was also the first widely available mobile browser to support Ajax and the first mobile browser to pass ACID2 test.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mobile_browser
Web hosting providers and content creators didn't put much effort in to creating an alternate internet using WAP and WML. It just never materialized as viable.
Yeah I kinda wish fewer sites gave me the mobile version. I really hate the sites that give me the mobile version after I request the desktop version.
I think this is what never made sense to me about the failure of Windows Phone. They have a store. They have an operating system. They have an unbelievably extensive list of hardware partners with decades of manufacturing experience. They have some of the best engineers in the world. And yet, they ceded the single largest consumer industry to Google and Apple. The only explanation is poor leadership.
Eventually they tried all these things but too late. They tried rebuilding the OS to be for more than just desktops, they tried rebuilding app platforms to not be platform specific, they tried rebuilding the interface to not be use type specific. It lead to a lot of angst due to the churn and a failure in the mobile space as their competitors already had working alternatives to all of these before they even launched.
Poor leadership for sure but in waiting through all the 2000s and letting other's fill the space not because they already had everything made for them and let it fall apart.
Xbox is one area that has seemed to really pan out for them which got all of these changes over time but again they launched that in the early 2000s not the early 2010s.
It's interesting that the perception wasn't the same in other parts of the world. Windows Phone seemed to be a premium product in Argentina. Think it had good acceptance in parts of Europe too, likely due to the Nokia versions. Perhaps trying to conquer the world except North America could have been a viable strategy but that's hard to really know and given the influence of the North American market on global culture, it might not have worked.
Windows Phone had several major opportunity positions where they had all the software the needed and all the hardware they needed to make a statement and then: cellphone carriers simply refused to sell SIM cards to them.
For pretty much the entire lifespan of Windows Phone it generally only had one of two major US carriers reluctantly shipping its flagship and the other supposedly "angry" at Microsoft and refusing to even allow it SIM cards on its network, with flip flopping which one was which between different "flagship" phones.
How does any product survive in an ecosystem that harsh?
This shouldn't be an issue, in much the same way "Comcast only supports Dell and Lenovo laptops" would be incredibly weird.
They even helpfully provide a compatibility list: https://www.xfinity.com/support/devices/#unauth
But also, it really isn't all that bizarre, it's got long precedent: For most of a century all phones were leased and the phone company controlled every bit of hardware on the network. That's not even the distant past, that's still in living memory, my parents grew up in households with leased phones.
It took major anti-trust/monopoly breakup work to change that. So far the "use whatever phone you want" is the anomaly in the history of phone networks. (Cable companies too; most of their history all of their equipment was only leased and the era of being able to buy your own set top boxes and/or cable modems is a relatively brief anomaly versus the longer history of those networks.)
The US is back down to only two/three major cell carriers (no matter how many "brands" you see; so many of them are just resellers), depending on how you want to count them (by network compatibility: two; by parent company: three). It may be time to trust-bust again.
(Admittedly, I still don't se a lot of the point in Microsoft running Chromium Edge other than sadness and defeat. I use Chromium Edge on my work machine because they block Firefox and I dislike Chrome and Chromium Edge is such a sad shell of what Edge once was.)
Amazon has tried to improve the Android ecosystem since day one, on the taking things at face value that Android was supposed to be an open platform for innovation, and instead has failed in just about every possible way. More than any other company, Amazon continues to prove that you cannot improve Android without Google's rubber stamp and that no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. Amazon's App Store is still the next biggest Android App Store after Google's and it can barely be listed as an "Also Ran" on the scorecard way below Google's numbers.
Samsung similarly has spend nearly as much effort trying to improve Android and seen all sorts of failures. They've proved that few care about AOSP hardware improvements if it doesn't have Google's rubber stamp. They've proved in their own attempts no one wants an AOSP-based phone without "Play Services" or Google's App Store. They've proved that you can't use AOSP certified hardware to bypass the cellphone carriers' extreme aversion to a Third option in the ecosystem and continue to fail at trying to bring Tizen phones to market (because the cell carriers don't care about AOSP, they care about "Android" TM, Google Style).
What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? What would be any sort of point in Microsoft investing in AOSP-based products when they have no easier time of selling them through today's cell carriers than they had with a proven Kernel and software stack that they own entirely? Especially without Google's complete consent and access to "Play Services" and the Google App Store moat, what can Microsoft possibly offer in Android that they couldn't better offer in "Windows Phone 11" that wouldn't also see the same extraordinary bad luck/worse market conditions than Windows Phone <= 10?
(ETA: Especially all that as opposed to by the time Edge switched to Chromium there were already a half-dozen other browsers using Chromium as their base and also Microsoft had already contributed multiple improvements to Chromium for years. There's no "success stories" in "Open Source" Android. There's very few people running de-Gooogled Android successfully and no one has been able to market one successfully in stores. Microsoft themselves even contributed cash for some of the hard lessons of Cyanogen, Inc.'s funding for their eventual burnout.)
> What kind of "active improvement" can Microsoft bring to Android that Amazon and Samsung haven't already tried and failed at? A lot.. 1) the android Java VM is dogshit and abandonware, using openjdk would bring support for modern java, significantly improve performance on key workloads (e.g. ZGC sub 1ms pauses for android gaming..) and have a different impact of energy consumption. Those are 3 disruptives dimensions where microsoft can differentiate. 2) bring support for other programming languages would bring a competitive advantage vs the java only apps. 3) have an up to date linux kernel... Also properly finetuned like the Clear linux distro AKA disruptive perf 4) at the OS level there are many ways to improve the experience e.g. ships by default with a browser that has extensions support (such as Kiwi browser). Prebundle a power user extension pack (wikipedia link preview, tab search, etc) generally propose at installation time to optin for expert chosen apps that improve the experience (swiftkey, Tree of life, pomodoros, a notion like note taking app, etc). Moreover the playstore is filled with crappy app, there should be a default app that curate them and provide meaningful recommendations instead of letting users navigate that ocean of garbage in search of the hidden pearl. fix the many ergonomic nonsense failures (e.g ability to quickly set app, phone and alarm volume in any context). Backport many ideas found only in iphones. Correct absurdities such as Bluetooth profiles with mics not allowing spatial audio. also my lack of disk space force me to delete apps. Fine but how can't my O.S keep track of my deleted apps so that I don't have to remember their names to reinstall them.. I'm just someone who put 5minutes thinking about how to differentiate and alleviate pain points from Android, now imagine what a team of experts in user experience, paid full time could achieve in specifying the ideal smartphone O.S
Microsoft can't do a lot of the things you want to improve Android without dethroning Google Play Services. So very much of the "real" Android OS today is closed source and in "Play Services".
That's why Amazon and Samsung (and Cyanogen and its successors like LineageOS and…) have invested so much money into failures at this point!
Android isn't an open source OS. It's a proprietary OS with an open source "crust".
1) The Android Java VM is tied up in lawsuit settlements between Google and Oracle at this point. Even Google likely can't replace it without repercussions or follow up lawsuits. This seems a large part of why Dart seems so important to Flutter and Fuchsia and what have you. (Plus Sun forbid Microsoft from ever touching Java again back in the 90s.)
2) Microsoft already sells/supports what was called Xamarin and is now called MAUI. They also seem to actively contribute to React Native.
Most of the rest I cannot comment on because I'm not an Android user. As a former Windows Phone user, I feel Microsoft had an "ideal smartphone OS" and the market decided it couldn't support it and would rather Google be in charge of a "nowhere close to ideal smartphone OS".
Too bad even desktop Windows is pushing for an App Store, gradually taking control away.
I see where this is going. One reason I'd use Windows anymore is if I needed a dedicated GPU now with Windows-only drivers, for its computing efficiency.
I wouldn't count on it being available long-term, as proprietary software eventually loses support and compatibility with the rest of the world.
However, I don't need such special hardware, and I am perfectly happy with an integrated GPU. The heaviest video or massively-parallel tasks that I perform do not warrant a dedicated one, and I run them on my CPU.
The other reason I'd use Windows is if a customer required me to do so (and of course I'd charge for it).
It was far ahead of iphone/android. Things might have been different with it and it's successors.