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Comment by afavour | Hacker News Reader

I'm not so sure. There will always be viable alternative histories of course but their existing Symbian OS was already long in the tooth and would have required a lot of work to catch up to the smartphone world and I'm just not convinced they had it in them.

Arguably they should have just gone with Android, and it's easy to say that in hindsight. But Android was a horrible mess in its 2.x era, Windows Phone seemed like a genuinely interesting alternative. Until Microsoft repeatedly messed the whole thing up.

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As others have said, they had Maemo/Meego. As the owner of a N900 myself, it was really good, but they decided not to bet on it for some inexplicable reason.

I am sure the reason came from Microsoft. They have mastered outplacement as an offensive weapon.

I think the reason was a lack of thriving app ecosystem. Microsoft seemed like a much better bet in that regard, they just messed it up in incredible ways.

Microsoft was a horrible bet in that regard. Maemo was a natural development platform for many products (just straight out of my head: Mozilla, VMware and Rovio have all chosen it organically), to the point where there was plenty of notable stuff that was first developed on Nokia N900 and ported to Android/iOS afterwards, but only officially released for iOS and Android because Maemo was already abandoned as a consumer platform. Windows Phone had no such gravitational pull at all and its lack of software eventually became an internet meme.

I'm not convinced by that. If Maemo was a natural fit then Microsoft surely was equally so, given they already had Windows Mobile. They also had a large army of developers familiar with Microsoft APIs and the financial backing a large tech company can provide (IIRC MS literally paid people to make apps for Windows Phone). That's the kind of thing you'd need to catch up in an app library race you're already losing.

Yeah, we can look back in retrospect and say it was an obvious failure but that's because of the various insane choices MS made over the years. In the moment I'd argue the decision was nowhere near as clear cut.

They had no developers familiar with these Microsoft APIs as Windows Phone was starting from scratch with new APIs that were incompatible with neither Win32 nor WinCE/Windows Mobile. The only thing that could save them that they were betting on was that these new APIs were also made available on desktops, but were pretty much ignored by developers there as well and ended up largely replaced with an even newer set of technologies.

Compare that with Maemo, where both GTK+ and Qt were first class citizens and which had an army of developers familiar with Unix and X11 before Maemo even existed.

GTK wasn't a first class citizen in Meego.

Never claimed it was.

Nor was it in the final versions of Maemo, if you want to be pedantic.

Nor was Qt in its first versions, but how is this adding value to the conversation? Both of them were first-class in Maemo 5 and that's when the developers were clearly being attracted to the platform which is what I was talking about above. Harmattan was already DoA.

I mean MS paid a stupid amount of money for Nokia too, i think that was they mayor influence. MS bought a platform to run Windows on for $10 billion if i remember correctly?

Today the vast majority of people I know rarely use the browser on their phones. They interact with the internet through apps from various walled gardens, and even for news on the open web they are likely to install someone's app. Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply.

Same goes for Nokia's Maemo and Meego. We nerds loved those OSs for being full-blown computer OSs, but the general public doesn't want a full-blown OS, they want a bunch of icons to corporate apps.

> Windows wouldn't have stood a chance if app development became so quickly an iOS/Android duoply.

That was always the problem. But IMO Microsoft were probably the company best placed to compete there, given the existing developer mindshare they had. But they just messed it up, over and over. Incredibly to look back on, really.

Their Windows CE developer mindshare didn’t make the translation to post iPhone software. There was so little in common between the two worlds one would need to start from scratch.

> Arguably they should have just gone with Android,

It's not obvious Nokia could have realistically competed with the East Asian phone manufacturers for more than a few years. It was/is a very low margin market with very cutthroat competition.

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