Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

Comment by znpy | Hacker News Reader

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> Microsoft simply lacked the network effects

Microsoft execs had their heads buried too deep in their own asses to be able to understand what was needed at the time.

They pushed a platform (Windows phone) that lacked interesting features out of the box, lacked cloud services integration to fill the gap left by the lacking base features, and required Windows as a development platform (and, iirc, C# as well?). It didn't even have any particular windows-ecosystem speciality: no special exchange integration, no special windows pc integration, nothing. Microsoft could have exploited the same reasons they exploited with Azure, Office365 and the general enterprise: microsoft phones should just integrates perfectly with other microsoft stuff. It could have been the no-brainer choice: we use ActiveDirectory and Office365 as a suite, we'll get a Windows Phones as everything just works immediately. No, nobody had thought of that.

The value proposition was just not there.

So basically another walled garden, but dumber. And the hardware didn't have anything special to make it "worth".

I think there’s more to it than this, and it’s subtle: The iPhone was cool.

Seriously, the original iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls. (It took the combined efforts of Apple and AT&T a couple generations before you could reliably place a call.)

But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth. It could zoom. And Steve Jobs marketed it well, whereas Steve Ballmer was terrible at marketing.

IMO the iPhone was considerably worse for business use than Windows Mobile, and neither one held a candle to the BlackBerry. But it didn’t matter.

>Steve Ballmer was terrible at marketing.

you could have just shortened that to "Steve Ballmer was terrible" and been more accurate.

> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth.

Basically an observation that consumers were interested in digital media players, which Apple had some expertise in building (iPods, for younger folks).

And that a usable browser was a killer feature (most of the web not having reactive mobile sites, and no apps, then).

And if you combined all of the above with a cell phone, customers would rather carry 1 device than the 3 it previously took.

> And if you combined all of the above with a cell phone, customers would rather carry 1 device than the 3 it previously took.

And not coincidentally this is exactly how Jobs pitched the original iPhone unveil.

An iPod, a phone, an internet communicator, an iPod, a phone…

> iPhone had little going for it technically. No GPS, poor data bandwidth, no apps, and minimal ability to make phone calls.

Things that apparently were not that important at launch. Apple did negotiate "unlimited" data plans with Cingular/AT&T.

> But it had a touch screen that felt nice, and you could watch videos and play music! The web browser actually performed well despite the low bandwidth

Better UI, better media playback, web browser that worked. Sounds like a classic example of Apple taking what is out there and simply doing it better.

Windows Phone (as opposed to Windows Mobile, which was basically moribund at the time the iPhone came out, and was replaced with the incompatible Windows Phone) wasn’t competing with the original iPhone; it came out shortly after the iPhone 4.

IMO the real problem with Windows Phone was the complete failure to produce an actual platform. Windows Phone 7 was incompatible with Windows Mobile, and _Windows Phone 8 was largely incompatible with Windows Phone 7_! The whole thing was comically developer hostile.

(Second mistake; Windows Phone 7’s UI ran at 30fps, presumably in an attempt to save battery. This made it feel a lot worse than iOS and Android.)

Microsoft failed because they weren't persistent enough. When you are the third entry in the market, you need to stay on the race and improve. Windows phone was profitable - $3.8 billion in a quarter using Lumias. But Nadella wanted to make Microsoft a cloud services company and leave the OS behind, so he axed the Phone.

Now, Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone space and Windows is slowly dying. Microsoft will just set to become yet another boring cloud services company.

> Apple is achieving per-eminance in the cross-device consumer OS market in the latop+tablet+smartphone

Only in the US and global high-end market. This is an extremely profitable market to be leading and I'm not trying to minimize Apple's achievement, but globally relatively few people use their phones and tablets, and ever fewer use their traditional computers.

Apple has a sizable lead, but I think the "idea" of what a smartphone is has been locked in essentially in the mind of consumers and their technological lead will only last so long as time passes. They are Microsoft but of smartphones and 20 years younger than windows desktop PCs. They know this, which is why they constantly make new things and try to develop new products (vr headsets, etc).

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