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Comment by adra | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft didn't miss mobile, they supported many or all verticals of mobile probably 10 years before it ever really took off. They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat by miss-judging the market or self defeating strategies to protect their other products/partners.

I do see some similarities with the companies though. It's hard to say or blame this on CEOs, but rather a maturity of companies that no longer have founder CEOs and how that changes the nature of people's interactions from top to bottom.

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> Microsoft didn't miss mobile

They missed mobile. Apple (and later Android) delivered what average consumers wanted. Average consumers do not want to have to be a personal IT department to upgrade their software and manage backups of their settings/apps.

As someone who had a Windows CE iPaq and wanted to love it, the user experience was so frustrating. It was nicknamed Wince for a reason.

For example, since Windows CE was burned into the iPaq's ROM, you had to upgrade he ROM. To upgrade the ROM...

> This ROM update will Clean Reset the HP iPAQ Handheld device to factory settings. Performing a Clean Reset will return the device to its default settings, and clear all user applications and data. Before performing this ROM update, back up all your data.

I had a succession of Windows CE devices (iPaq 3600, 3800, 4500, whatever the monochromatic one was, plus some Toshiba (?) that used an SH4, and 3 or 4 more that I could maybe pick out of a lineup but no longer remember). If memory serves, the Toshiba and the later iPaqs weren’t nearly so destructive on updates.

Whoa, you were a much more dedicated user than I ever was. Thanks for providing historical context that they learned from feedback and/or mistakes.

To be fair, I think, in retrospect, the iPod and iTunes sync process and system gave Apple a multi-year headstart with building and developing a consumer-friendly backup and sync process.

Internally at Microsoft, the flops were obvious. Employees made fun of the zune, there was a lot of embarrassment that staff were preferring iphones to free company-provided alternatives, etc. Leadership was putting $ in (remember the Nokia acquisition disaster?) and individual teams were doing neato things, but leadership was feudal & by-the-numbers with many tiny product owners, and not led by a good overall product person.

My introduction to Microsoft's problems came about 20 years ago. I was talking to a developer that worked there who kept emphasizing that Microsoft was such a boring place to work compared to companies like Google. Open source was the enemy, and they were supposed to give their all to further the Windows and Office monopolies - proprietary, corporate software. Meanwhile he was watching what was happening in the Linux world and elsewhere. There was a plan, it's just that it was to maximize next quarter's revenue.

> Microsoft didn't miss mobile

> They absolutely bungled it and pulled 3-4 various strategies that all seemed to fall flat

So...they missed mobile.

Did they misjudge the market? Windows CE was quite popular in the smartphone segment before iOS and Android steamrollered every existing incumbent. The idea that having a computer in your pocket was important, that was classic 90s era Gatesism and they were right on target.

Microsoft lost (not missed) mobile because the Windows team had been losing the ability to execute competently. iOS was essentially macOS for mobile, and Windows wasn't competitive with macOS on the desktop and still isn't today so it wasn't a big surprise that they couldn't pull off great results on mobile either. For as long as the mobile playing field didn't have the most competent companies doing software they could be the leader but once Apple/Google showed up the piles of tech debt and general apathy got the better of them.

Android is just now catching up with where Windows Mobile was years ago. Execution wasn't the problem. The problem remains that Gmail and YouTube are monopolies and Google aggressively interfered with them working on WinMo because it was Android's only real competitor (an OS licensed to phone OEMs).

Microsoft obviously has it's own monopolies but it failed to leverage them on mobile. Shockingly, a great experience using Excel on a 4" screen isn't a huge selling point.

YouTube hardly mattered on mobile at the time we're talking about, iPhone 1 didn't even do 3G. Gmail isn't a monopoly and never has been. iPhone came out just a few years after Gmail did, whilst Microsoft had Outlook/Exchange in the enterprise which practically was a monopoly.

The Windows team didn't really care about slick UI until long after Apple beat them on that. And the reason they scrapped CE and tried to do UWP is because the Windows API was long ago on its last legs but they hadn't been able to upgrade it properly. Whereas Apple had managed the evolution of nextstep much better, and Android was free / a clean slate design with proper sandboxing, and better consumer apps.

This is a very weird take. Complaining that Google is monopolistic compared to Microsoft, of all companies.

Microsoft never came close to the level of intersecting monopolies Google has. Also, Google learned from Microsoft's mistake: It spread political money early and often to ensure it wouldn't get regulated nearly as quickly. Google aggressively paid off Democrats and Republicans alike, and despite bipartisan support for dealing with them, regulation work is still slow and ineffective.

Now that's not to say Microsoft doesn't hold any monopolistic positions or engage in monopolistic behavior, most large companies eventually do and Microsoft still does where opportunity presents.

But if you think Microsoft is a monopoly and Google isn't, you have a view of the industry that is two decades out of date.

I think the most monopolistic portion of Google besides search would be their hold on the ad tech industry (and even then you have other online giants Meta, Tiktok, Amazon, etc.) but I don't necessarily understand how you can say they have a monopoly on consumer products large enough to drive adoption of Android especially 15 years ago.

Gmail, Google Drive, Google Maps, Google Chrome and Android either have direct competitors in other ecosystem or are open source. YouTube and search are the only ones I can think of without direct competition. And the competition for these products come from Apple and Microsoft who are more/just as entrenched in owning and growing their entire platform.

Something like 70% of email is controlled by Google, and you cannot operate an email service if you do not meet Google's demands. If your business isn't listed in Google Maps, it doesn't matter what industry you are in, Google has killed you. Chrome and Android aren't open source (at least, not the version running on 99.9% of their respective install bases), and both operate as near complete monopolies. Chrome has used its position to reshape the very standards of the web to meet Google's business need and try to block competitors. Android has no competition at all, as I explained above: For manufacturers building devices it's the only OS in town.

While ignoring all these huge monopolies, you claim search has no competition. Ironically, about a third of global search queries are serviced by Bing! I would go so far as to say the monopolies above are as powerful, or moreso, than Google's grip on search.

Gmail has a 23% market share

https://www.oberlo.com/statistics/most-used-email-clients

And “email is for old people”. How much important personal communication even goes over email?

That statistic does not mean what you think it means, it's about clients. That ignores the fact that people open their Gmail with Samsung, Apple, and Windows mail apps. 66% of folks are not running around with icloud.com addresses.

Yeah I truly don't understand how you can look at email and maps and say Apple and Microsoft aren't also competing in those spaces.

Chromium and AOSP also aren't trivial contributions to open source and having the ability to fork those projects is much preferable to me than a proprietary solution that's more democratic once it achieves market dominance. Manufacturers building their own devices having nowhere to go was a problem pre-Android and a reason they'd rather license Google's OS rather than compete against Apple. And I think the decision of web standards has grown to be a bigger issue beyond what W3C or Google should be handling at this point, we treat the internet as public utility with the promise of standards without actual regulations and our browsers are an extension of that mess currently (not to say government is actually equipped to solve the issue).

I wasn't ignoring those other services I was doubting their monopolies unless we're changing the definition. I'd say the majority of dominant tech products have a large market share with few competitors but which are monopolies? I'd agree Android/Chrome was a monopoly if iOS, iPadOS, MacOS, Safari, Windows, Azure, AWS and I guess bing all start getting a look at for markets with seemingly only one/two other competitors, especially when you look at the fact they contribute little to nothing back for public benefit.

“Windows Mobile lost to Android because of Gmail and YouTube” is an absolutely wild take.

Nah, Blackberry, ohsa, Nokia dominance, etc. were way more relevant to the markets than Windows Mobile (not really CE as CE is more relevant for embedded and tablet like verticals).

The iPAQ H3600 came out in 2000, and the O2 XDA in 2003 - pocket-sized, touchscreen, keyboardless, ARM-based devices with web browsers - with Microsoft providing the OSes for them.

So in a sense they had a lot of the parts of the winning recipe. They just didn't have capacitive touchscreens. Or decent batteries. Or affordable flash memory. Or gorilla glass. Or an on-screen keyboard you could usefully use without a stylus. And mobile data was slow and very expensive.

The rest of the phone market, at the time, was off doing weird things like WAP.

Microsoft missed the market in the sense they weren't on the flight when it took off - but they didn't miss it, in the sense they were at the right departure gate hours before any of the other passengers.

I’d say the key mistake they made was accepting carrier and OEM intermediation. Apple figured out how to get the carriers out of the way (trading off support down to a single carrier!) while also owning the hardware, and Android OEMs piggybacked on this model.

Microsoft recognized that GUIs were important enough to their future to make what were arguably the best mice available. If they had “caught” mobile, they would have done the same for phones.

I think Microsoft's strength was their weakness in a sense. They had so much O/S related experience and assets that no one could fathom not using Windows as the core. Imagine explaining to your MS middle manager that writing a new O/S from scratch is a good idea - especially with Balmer at the helm.

Apple didn't write an OS from scratch either. iOS was really a fork of OS X, and followed on the experience Apple & NeXT had in porting NeXTstep around various architectures. Something that MS also had a lot of experience with, with NT.

Apple won/created this market on fit and finish, excellent marketing, singular focused execution, and supply chain genius.

With wince, Microsoft was running around farming out their OS to multiple 3rd party vendors, trying to create a commodity marketplace for their OS on other people's devices.

Apple won on vertical integration, created a focus product, and profited off the experiences and reputation they had with iPod in order to make a winner.

But people also forget that at this point in Apple's history, it was kind of... make or break. The iPod and then iPhone were huge gambles, that paid off in spades. If they had failed Apple would have continued to be a minority PC producer with poor profit margins and a reputation for being "weird" and "niche." Even after the success of the iMac in the late 90s, they were still in quite a bit of $$ risk.

The intense vertical integration and the product focus in the iPhone could also have failed. It was risky but it paid off for them. MS (and others) had a lot more to lose, and was more conservative.

Apple had giant profit margins on Macs even back in the iPhone days.

If that was the case android would also be in the sinking same boat. Vertical integration isn’t what made iPhone and android.

I like this hypothesis better than mine.

I believe WinCE was a "new" (or at least different) OS. it sort of had Win32 like APIs on top of it, but the core was fundamentally different than NT. They only sort of got things moving in the right direction (only to then abandon it) when they had their mobile platform on top of the "normal" (pared down) NT stack.

I read recently that the Xbox team maintained Ballmer’s support for their project by leading him to believe the Xbox would run Windows, while they were actually writing a dedicated console OS.

They likely had to promise that it would run Office as well.

Isn't it more that nurturing more than one unicorn is vanishingly unlikely? All these companies can do is to wield their enormous power for as long as they can until the inevitable happens and they become an also ran.

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