Windows Phone Is Failing Because It’s Great
torontostandard.com
Windows Phone Is Failing Because It’s Great
Of all the ways you might have imagined Microsoft screwing up, “making something fantastic” is probably last on the list.
torontostandard.com
MS has lost its smartphone brand credibility. Releasing good, solid products will help them rebuild it but even if they successfully rebuild credibility it'll be a long time before sales catch up.
See also: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3395281
Edit: I found a decent chart that tells the tale: http://www-bgr-com.vimg.net/wp-content/uploads/2011/12/npd-u...
P.P.S. I've said it before, but I think it might be some sort of great cosmic karmic justice if somehow Microsoft got shafted trying to peddle a "superior" product in the face of competitors with network effect on their side.
I've seen this even among (otherwise) loyal Microsoft employees. When I remarked on a friend's iPhone he rolled his eyes and said "I've spent literally thousands of dollars on Windows Mobile Phones. I wanted to like them. They were all shit. All of them."
I'm intrigued by Windows Phone 7. I keep hearing it's great, but "Windows Mobile" and "Windows Phone" have so much negative brand affinity, I have a hard time seeing who will buy them. XBox fans, maybe?
Let me take you back to 2006. iPods were still using the classic click wheel. iTunes was horribly slow on a PC. Microsoft comes out with a competitor that has a simple up/down/left/right directional pad, and software that looks stunning and runs better on a PC. Many weren't sold on the idea. Many of those who were, however, loved it. Killer feature: the Zune Pass. All-you-can-eat from a huge library, fully integrated, syncs over wifi right to your player.
Time passes, and PMPs are a thing of the past. It's about phones now. You can either go back to using the iPod via the iPhone (and back to iTunes) and lose the Zune Pass, or to Android during its early, rough years. Still losing the Zune Pass, and having no centralized music manager. Then Microsoft comes along with a Zune phone, killer interface, Office, and Xbox Live to boot. I kept using my Zune right up to the point when I got a Windows Phone.
Microsoft is making some slam dunks recently, but the people and the press were, for a long time, unwilling to get burned again (understandably). Problem is, now the press has changed their tune but the people haven't. The Zune was a killer PMP, and now I can have it in phone form. For others, it's not so much that but the idea of not needing iTunes. That's major.
Now that I feel like a dirty shill, I'm going to go take a shower.
iTunes' hitherto expansion in scope has been amusing / scary. I noticed that the iOS app collection got saved in a subdirectory of ~/Music/ :)
The subscription service was as much of a joke. Sure, it sounds great to be able to access a huge library for a low monthly fee, but guess what, if you don't pay that monthly fee...forever...you won't have access to any of your favorite music. A track on iTunes is $0.99. A track on the Zune subscription service was $∞.00.
Though as an interesting PS, the Zune Pass offers (offered?) 10 free permanent downloads every month. So, at 99c a track, you'd more or less make your subscription fee back.
The subscription model is the modern equivalent of the Columbia Music House. They'll send you music relentlessly even when you don't want it, only in this case if you cancel it all goes away and you've got nothing to show for it.
You'd have to be diligent to use those ten free downloads a month. You can't bank them, can you?
This is a ridiculous comparison. Do you pay for Netflix? Hulu Plus? Cable? Internet access? These are all subscription services.
Does it cost you infinite money to read Hacker News? Or to watch "Frasier" on cable or Netflix? Of course not. Zune Pass doesn't cost infinite money, either.
Columbia House was (is?) very nearly the opposite of a subscription. You paid for a crappy CD every month. You owned it. You didn't get inclusive access to a catalog.
Name 3 music subscription services that have 90+% overlap in their catalogs.
I hope, for everyone's sake, that the Windows Phone market is bigger than just the handful of people who bought Zunes.
We've come so far since then!
1 - They were stupidly late to market
2 - Both the Windows brand and Microsoft's imagine are at best mehh..at worse very uncool and bad.
#1 is important because Microsoft simply doesn't set the [consumer] agenda any more. I don't think they've realized this. And until they do, they are just gonna keep being behind ([good] tablets).
#2 is important because if you don't realize how tarnished your brand is, you're royally screwed.
It doesn't matter how great your product is if it comes years too late. And it doesn't matter how great your product is if people have written you off already. Combine the two...come on, the thing has no chance.
re #1: there are still many markets out there with little smartphone usage.
re #2: perhaps Nokia can help them out here.
As a small case study consider India. 3G services have just been introduced in the last few months, and most people are just beginning to shift from feature phones to smartphones. Apple has a very poor retail presence here, and the iPhone is priced ridiculously high. On my visit there in December, I saw massive amounts of advertising for the Nokia Lumia (on tv and in malls) and casual conversation with friends revealed plenty of curiosity about Nokia and windows phone, how it might compare to android, and what would be better for future purchases.
As for #2, it's still too early to see how Nokia plays out, but I agree that it could change the landscape..or it might not at all. I won't be surprised either way. And if it doesn't, maybe they'll try do do something with RIM. So ya, they'll throw a ton of money at the problem.
But it's still an uphill battle and it isn't like the current leaders have become stale. So I guess until Apple AND Google start doing serious missteps, I'll continue to be skeptical.
* nokia shot themselves in both feet in 2009. in 2008 at any meeting of geeks, nerds i would see 99% nokias. in 2010 it was 90% android. there was no single reason why people switched away from symbian. but we all switched. i know only one person who ever carried a windows mobile device. and he only carried it as it was guaranteed to crash eliminating the annoying calls he was bombarded with. i only know 2 people who bought nokia in the past 2 years. one was a maemo device before they were eliminated and the other was a second hand device from ebay. new devices aren't shifting. i'd see them as people ask me to set them up more often than not.
was recently watching an old tv show and heard the nokia ring tone. made me realise i hadn't heard that tone in a public space in around 2 years. nokia is not their saviour. just been run down till microsoft can buy their patents at a bargin price would be my guess.
Who cares? The smartphone market is rapidly maturing and it won't matter who was first and who wasn't. Do you know if Toyota started producing cars years or decades after Ford? Do you care?
Also, you are missing that my two points intersect. Toyota has an strong brand, especially when it came/comes to reliability/quality/value. For most people buying cars, these are important qualities. So yes, they took the #1 spot because of the product they built and the brand they have. Microsoft's brand is so tarnished that it's way more of an uphill battle.
I find it hard to understand how people don't see the importance of brand loyalty in the face of Apple's extreme success.
Microsoft could do like Datsun and change to a better brand name. Meet the Nissan Phone 7.
>I find it hard to understand how people don't see the importance of brand loyalty in the face of Apple's extreme success.
That's not brand loyalty, that's marketing. The next company to market and design like/better than Apple will gobble that "brand loyalty" right up. Unfortunately that likely won't be Google or Microsoft.
We all know what happened to them wen their products sucked too much for too long.
It isn't. But as long as people don't figure that out, Apple will continue to reap their rewards.
Assuming Microsoft do buy Nokia, as many people have speculated, I'm pretty sure they'd retain the Nokia brand for all mobile phone hardware.
The smartphone market is rapidly maturing, but that doesn't mean it can sustain a multitude of niche players indefinitely. Unlike in the car market, we'll likely only see a handful of major players able to participate profitably as the market settles a bit.
I'm not saying that Microsoft's doomed, they've certainly got the wherewithal to last longer than a failing RIM might or Palm/HP did, but in order to ever have a hit, they'll have to come up with some combination of killer new features, apps and devices.
So far, they're batting 0/3 on that front: 1) Mango is catching up to Android/iOS, but you're kidding yourself if you don't believe it's at least a little late to the game. 2) I certainly haven't heard of any killer apps for WP7 and as a developer, I've heard 0 interest in changing that. I'd love to play around with WP 7 and maybe even see what I could create for the platform, but without interest from my clients, it's DOA for me (and for customers). 3) The devices are mostly rehashes from Android models, and even those that aren't don't differentiate themselves from other medium-tier phones.
Great design is important, and I think most (technical) people will agree that Metro got it right, but claiming it's not successful because of that great design and not accounting for the two years it took to get to that point (the cost of lagging around with 6.5 and such while Apple / Android were building new platforms) is purposely misleading.
This is a problem that Android has created for the mobile phone market. Android has undeniably the worst performance of the three, and to compensate for that the handheld makers have started a spec race. Only when you get to superphone levels does Android really shine.
On the other hand, properly designed and controlled systems like iOS and WP7 don't require massive processing power to run smoothly. 1Ghz is perfectly fine, but I hear the complaint all the time that WP7 doesn't interest people because it's not dual core 1.5Ghz chips inside. It doesn't have it because it doesn't need it. Any other feature you'd like (slide out speaker, kickstand, keyboard, massive 5" screen, etc), it's got it. If you get out of the mindset that faster chips means more performance, WP7 has hardware out there that suits any need.
I'm genuinely curious as to why you think that. Do you feel the purchased apps lock-in will be significant in the long term?
Which would explain Xbox.
> 2 - Both the Windows brand and Microsoft's imagine are at best mehh..at worse very uncool and bad.
Which would explain Xbox.
Edit: sorry for being obtuse. The point is that Microsoft entered the gaming market with a worse brand than today, and later than with iPhones and is despite that very sucessful.
XBOX is also uniquely distanced from other huge Microsoft brands, and the overall Microsoft brand itself. People usually just say "XBOX", and it's conspicuously removed altogether from other brands such as Windows. Imagine if it had been called "Windows Game System".
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_video_game_consoles_...
The history of Sega and Sony alone are very telling.
I will admit that I'm surprised that Xbox's branding easily survived the ring-of-death disaster. Part of that is how much money they threw at the problem and part of that is the state of the market [for hard-core console gamers].
Also, remember that the division is billions of dollars in the red. It'll likely take them 2 more iterations (or 10+ years) to break even assuming they can keep their current momentum (which history tells us will be hard).
Windows Mobile has had a decade of shitty products that have ruined its reputation. A full ten years, during which their competitors were essentially jump-starting the modern smartphone market. They've now got what people say is a quality product, but they'll have to work twice as hard to win back iPhone and Android converts.
The Xbox, on the other hand, was (1) a first entry for Microsoft into a new market and (2) not associated with ANY existing Microsoft brand. The Xbox line won support based on its merit and quality (even considering ridiculous shit like the Red Ring of Death issues) from day one.
Halo explains the Xbox -- which Microsoft acquired to make exclusive to the Xbox.
The actual OS can be the best of them, but we would be very stupid if we forget the last 30 years of MS history.
That's why MS image is 'uncool' and 'bad'.
The product coming to market years too late? I don't think it matters at all, if it's the right product from the right company.
What should MS do? They need to produce a product that is similar in quality to the iPhone. Microsoft understands how to do this better than anyone else in the mobile space, but it means stripping away most of the carrier control and the carriers obviously won't go for it. And if you don't have the support of the carriers then you're dead, and that's the position Windows Phone finds itself.
Apple sells phones to users. Every other manufacturer sells phones to carriers, that means it's all about making the carriers happy. RIM, Samsung, LG, and Motorola all know this.
Nokia understands this better than any other manufacturer, which is why their involvement with Windows Phone is so important to MS. And at this point the success of Windows Phone depends entirely on Nokia.
It will be interesting to see what Nokia does to the Windows Phone platform to make it more palatable to the carriers, but we can be certain that those changes won't be particularly user friendly (not that it matters).
With other, tech-ignorant college students as my data points, I have found that most people's first impressions of the OS are quite positive, ranging from "oh, that phone's nice" (and they aren't talking about the physical device, a bland, somewhat chubby HTC Trophy) to "that's the coolest phone I've ever seen." As mentioned, these aren't people into tech I'm talking about—most of them have iPhones because they wanted one, or everyone else has one, or because there parents got them, so they did, too. I thus do not actively promote my phone in any way—all I've been doing, when I've gotten these sorts of responses, has been showing someone what someone else texted me, or some other datum or whatnot.
When they inevitably ask—"what kind of phone is that?"—and I say "Windows Phone," they, just as inevitably, immediately lose all interest.
This may parallel, I suppose, the reason Xbox, for example, remains instead successful years after its introduction: one of my uncles called my dad on Christmas day this year concering some computer or network problem (my dad, as a software engineer, of course bears that burden in our family), and mentioned incidentally that he had gotten my cousin an Xbox as a gift. My dad, who used to work for Microsoft and still gets a discount on their software, suggested that he might have been able to save some cash had my uncle told him ahead of time, or that he could still save on games if he wanted. What did my uncle say, however, but "oh, I didn't know it [Xbox] was Microsoft." Indeed, my uncle to this day refers to Microsft in conversation with my dad as "the evil empire."
So yeah, I think the brand name itself, however irrational the reason, hasn't helped at all. Also, there isn't a single actual window in the Windows Phone OS... Time to change up the name.
WinMo has been with us for 10 years. Microsoft had a large market share of the smartphone market a five years ago but they let their product stagnate. If they weren't complacent, Apple and Android wouldn't have had a chance.
What the article should say is that Microsoft took way too long to finally deliver a quality product and the competition came in and ate their lunch.
Also, because Android is open source, it will reach markets that WP7 never will because it's proprietary and it has restrictions that are even higher than the desktop Windows, which back then "won" because it was the default option for the market leader IBM, and it had no real "mass-market" competition before it.
Android is the default option already for pretty much any manufacturer now, from noname Asian manufacturers to more recognized companies.
Another factor is the Windows phone, Android and iPhone have about the same initial and per month cost. Roughly the same price but All 3 give very different values back in terms of apps,feature,ease of use. Coping with the downsides or nuances is also a 2 year commitment so unless an option is clearly way ,way better, people will stick with an iPhone or go back.
With pcs it's a different ballpark. A macbook feels nicer than a generic Acer notebook, but one costs $1,500 and the other $499. The phones are all around $199 and plans are about 70 bucks a month. Even if the phone is "free" the per month payment is the same.
Also the iPhone sets a standard of experience which still is unmatched. If I drove a mercedez, then switched to an Acura and didn't like it as much, it doesn't mean either is bad. Acura is awesome, but I might miss the feeling,driving, status,smell, etc and hold the Acura up the Mercedez standards. Windows phone is stuck in an unconfortable situation where it doesn't give way greater value to an iphone user but doesn't cost way less either to make it into other emerging markets and grab marketshare from somewhere else.
I think you're discounting the invested value of apps. I've probably got about $400 worth of paid-for apps on my iPhone. The Windows phone might be the "coolest", but my migration cost is far greater than just the hardware cost to get back to a similarly useful handset.
Android seems to have more free apps, and less overall selection. It might be easier to switch from Android to Windows phone than iPhone to Windows phone.
Still there's millions of new users who are just about to get a new smartphone coming from candy bar phones, and when shopping they just go mostly look up for the iphone. I stood up at an ATT store some times watching how people shopped phones. The color squares of Windows Phone and huge screens of android phones attract people initially, but as soon as they start comparing they flock to the iPhone.
Amazingly, I just got back from a vacation in Mexico where smartphones are just becoming popular, and went to the local vendors out of curiosity. The push for IOS/android is impressive, there are ads on the street, movies, everywhere. You can get an iPhone with no downpayment and 600 pesos(45 usd) a month.
Android also looked after the carriers, as the author had pointed out, by flooding market with choices. The presence of these "choices" overload the consumer, making them forget about choosing carriers.
Microsoft, meanwhile, tried to persuade people that the phones they own are like the PCs they own. I don't think this will necessarily gel. The reason is I still can use my PC when internet is down, but my phone is a brick if it can't communicate with the network.
1) had a great product 2) had no existing mobile revenue stream to lose 3) was able to shop the device around to several carriers before settling on one launch carrier - without even showing the device to the carrier!
Compare this to Nokia, which once made a E61 version without WiFi and VoIP support in order to sell it to carriers in the US.
Android looked after the carriers by allowing them and the manufacturers to install (almost) what they want on the device, including applications that you can't uninstall without jailbreaking the device.
By the way, my phone is certainly not a brick without a network. I have all my music, videos, ebooks and lots of apps on it. I use it all the time in airplane mode when flying.
edit: not literally.
See also "Xbox LIVE Extras" (messaging, scoreboard and avatar editor) and the "Xbox Companion" (Xbox remote control).
http://www.xbox.com/en-US/Live/Mobile/Home http://www.windowsphone.com/en-US/search?q=xbox
Having used a WP since this summer I love it. I can't say enough about it. If you're into social you'll love this phone with deep Facebook and Twitter integration.
I think the hardest thing about using this phone is missing out on apps that Android and iOS get. I'm resigned to the fact that if I stick with this phone that I'm going to miss out on a lot of cutting-edge apps. I can understand as a developer if you have to develop, maintain, and provide support for an app that two app stores is enough. The programming paradigm for WP is different enough where I could see a case for not poking that bear.
I am sad. I think WP has a lot going for it. It's really an elegant OS and it's a very good actual phone. I don't know if there's really room for a third horse in this race.
: P
An Xbox phone that looked like Windows Phone 7 would be no big deal for business, but an Xbox phone that looks like it is part of a gun from HALO probably would be a problem.
I walked out the door with a Windows Phone.
I like it I guess.. Wasn't sure I would, but I do. It's stable, holds a good charge, and is reliable. I deleted every icon from the main display, except two -- Voice and Messaging. Everything else is on the menu. Access is easy. Call clarity is good and the features work fine.
My main complaint is that I had to setup a Windows Live account to manage my contacts. I'd rather just plug it in to my computer and be done with it locally.
Am I Windows brand loyal? No. But I have had no issues whatsoever.
I bought my mom an ipod touch xmass 2010 and my dad an Android phone this xmass but both (in their late 60s) have trouble seeing the small icons.
In the end, he sold it and bought another Android phone, because the camera on the particular model he bought was complete junk. He said if it wasn't for that he would have stayed with WM7.
Everything I've read indicates it's a very nice OS. MS knows what they're doing so they've done a good job of making sure there are apps in the app store (where WebOS really stumbled).
I hope it stays around, it seems like a nice piece of competition (interface-wise) for Android and iOS. But it was so late to the game I think it's going to have a very hard time ever getting out of third.
People have suggested I try Big Launcher, Launcher 7, Simple Home which I may try to see if my dad likes one of them. Most of those pretty much make it look like a Windows phone.
This reminds me of the story about when then phone companies wanted to get into web hosting. They decided that uptime was their competitive edge (when last did your land-line go down?) and thought webmasters would see that as valuable. However, for many webmasters, cost was the big issue but the phone companies could not deliver at the same cost as lots of mom and pop webhosts who had (comparatively) horrendous uptime.
This is a classic strategy mistake. Value is in the eye of the buyer. The maker cannot decide something is valuable just because it is good. The buyer decides what is good and then the maker follows suit.
Think:
- A build once deploy to WP7, Win8 and Xbox Live dev to attract developers.
- Skydrive integration across all windows apps
- seamless Skype+Facebook+IM messaging
etc.
The fault lies not within our stars but within ourselves
(Hat tip F. Unger)
Take, for example, the requirement of getting your "Hello, World" app installed on real hardware and out to beta testers:
Apple: Pay your $99 bucks, get the development environment and your identity info, generate certs. You can have your app running on your own equipment in just a few hours. A couple more hours to figure out how to package it the right way for testers (or use TestFlight) and you can add up to 100 beta testers.
Android: Don't even need to sign up as a developer and pay your 25 bucks until you're ready to go. You can have your apk running on your own devices in no time at all. You can shoot your apk out to as many people as you want to test.
Blackberry: The web site's a hot mess, but it takes less than a day for them to get you your signing key, so you can generally get Hello World running on your Blackberry hardware within a day. You can shoot your app out to as many beta testers as you want.
Windows Phone: You can't test on real hardware until your developer's identity has been verified by a third party company external to Microsoft. There are documented cases where this has taken more than three months to complete. (This is if you can even pay for the developer's account because their web site rejects valid credit cards as a matter of course unless the stars are aligned. Apparently some bug where they see all credit cards as debit cards?) We're on month two and counting waiting to get 'verified.'
I totally get that they need to determine who you are in order to get your apps into the Marketplace (Apple does this as well, although I believe they do it internally--and they're relatively fast), but just to test your software on your own hardware?
Re: beta testing, you only get three registered development devices tops per developer and while they do have a facility for beta testing, it requires automated review by Microsoft to pop into the Marketplace.
I hear from Windows Phone users daily, many of whom moved to Windows Phone from Android phones because their phones were just too unreliable and they can't bring themselves to go to iPhone, and they are very vocal about being frustrated with the number and quality of apps available to them. I can't help but feel like Microsoft just doesn't understand how important quality apps are to smartphone users and how the friction they've got in their app developer workflow is a serious impediment to growing their app ecosystem.
I really wish Microsoft would get this workflow together already...they've got a fantastic chance here to make serious inroads but I don't feel like they really understand (mobile) Developers, Developers, Developers! yet.
Ars Technica did a much better job of summarizing what makes WP7 "great" and how that greatness repels hardware makers and carriers: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2011/12/is-windows-pho...
The basic line is something like "if it has been well engineered, and someone has put a whole lot of effort into it, and its a bit different to everything else out there, then we are basically obliged to give it high marks".
They seem incapable of judging devices by the most basic and important standard: user experience. If the user experience is bad, then nothing else matters. A user interface is not brilliant if no one wants to use it.
WinPho7 is the best current example of this going round. Almost universally acclaimed by reviewers, almost totally ignored by consumers.
Eg. CNet's UK editor has actually switched to WP from iPhone because of the UX. http://crave.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/why-i-dont-want-an-iphone-an...
Although you could take "user experience" to very generalized levels ("did it get to market early enough", "do my friends have it", "are there applications I want", "is it in the mobile phone store"), these are usually considered social or business questions. One only need look at the flop of the Nexus One -- basically a well designed phone, but one that was positioned poorly with carriers -- for evidence.
I think it is sociological and business factors that blight the Windows Phone, not its design or user experience, except in the most overgeneralized sense.
That's an interesting interpretation, I think the simple truth is that Microsoft is coming too late at the party. We're entering a nuclear winter where only Android and iOS (and soon, most likely mostly Android) dominate the space for the next five years to come.
On a related note, I found the following article fairly accurate when it comes to evaluate reactions to Windows Phone:
http://shysnowsquare.wordpress.com/2012/01/03/enemies-of-you...
Do an office suite? Not viable, MS has its own version.
Do a nice application for doing whatever? If it's successful MS will do their own version. And release it for free.
Balmer said it: Developers! Developers! Developers!
But now how can any developer invest in MS without realizing it is suicidal?
Metro is a bad UI. It looks impressive in screenshots, but its usability is dismal. It relies too much on trying to guide the customer and be exciting rather and too little on creating a sensible and memorable logic that the user can intuit.
The implementation on WP7 is bad, all squished and uni-coloured (and on Xbox it's even worse). It does not bode well at all for Microsoft that they can't seem to remember that software is supposed to be used. It's like they've only learned the lesson of typography from Apple, and not the elegance of actual use.
And what about it being uni-coloured? Much of Metro is extremely colorful, including the tiles.
Eg. http://ribot.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/Panorama_sampl...
http://www.wp7connect.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Woodgro...
http://techblog.ginktage.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/1.jp...
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lrTGyYjLlrU/TnNaJaTzqHI/AAAAAAAAAC...
Maybe you need to use the phone to appreciate it? Or at least link to an analysis or review stating that Metro UI is bad.
This is totally subjective, and probably just inertia w.r.t. what I'm already used to, but I just don't care for it, no matter how well reviewed it is.