I'm not saying that Microsoft doesn't have a chance at all but I think the odds are against Windows phones ever reaching a significant market share no matter how much capital and R&D they stack behind it.
This is the norm. The only thing people give a shit about is their data (and that is usually when it's way to late and they're about to lose it), not the apps.
http://lysy2.archives.nd.edu/cgi-bin/WORDS.EXE?virus
In English the plural is viruses.
In English, there's never a reason to use anything other than "viruses".
Actually, virus is a "mass noun" (uncountable) and has no plural. If it ever had a nominative plural it would be vira, and out of anything, viri is its genitive singular.
No, that's the Latin plural of vir; viri means "men" not "poisons" ("virus" means "poison" in Latin.) [1]
http://www.google.com/#q=translate+viri+from+latin+to+englis...
If one person is ignorant in one domain, that doesn't mean that person doesn't excel in another domain. Stupidity is relative.
E.g. my father can't use a computer and thinks his computer is broken whenever he has minor problems with it. On the other hand he has a perfect track record in managing government institutions and the family's business and he's also extremely good at handling money and being a cheap bastard. He never learned to use a computer simply because he can delegate such tasks to his subordinates (or me).
And yet you've placed him in the bucket of people with more money than brains, simply because somebody on this planet sold his computer because it was virused.
I had one customer who thought each phone was effectively a burner, and he threw them out when he got a new one. He also made sure the apple store activated his phone (before all went that way) as he thought it was useless to have a computer with the phone (because why was he buying the phone then?).
This story and many like it popped up again and again until I realized that the majority of users are completely ignorant of even the smallest details of how the device or its internals work, its is mostly a fashion statement.
The apple store will definitely attempt to gather that info, but at some point it is new account and have a great day!
This is NOT the norm.
That said, to pull off an iPhone- and Android-style upset though, Microsoft would need a correspondingly huge difference in user experience though. The UI on Windows Phone is nifty, but it's not enough of a game changer for most people. It'd really have to be something like successful execution of wearable computing or the convergence described here: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/08/want-t...
Even blackberry's didn't have nearly as high a share as iOS or Android.
I've posted several times about the awful experience:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6012362
I had some very ugly experiences setting up one for my cousin (I stupidly didn't lie and registered her as being from Uruguay and under 18), which made the phone behave like a brick ("sorry, no apps available in your country", "sorry, you have to be over 18 under laws from another country to use most of the features of this phone").
Changing the Live account did not work, I had to reset the phone and create another account for her, lying about her age and country so the phone could work properly (she wanted to use Skype and WhatsApp, not exactly the most demanding use case).
I didn't feel locked in at all to the "app ecosystem". Honestly web and email were paramount and everything else is secondary. At some point in the future I believe native apps will be passe in favor of a complete move to web applications making the underlying platform completely personal preference.
...oh.and at one time I was locked into my Palm Pilot. After that my Blackberry. Tell Apple to look at Palm or RIM if they want to know how long being the popular phone on the market lasts.
The primary way it is better is that the screen is so much bigger. This is easy to dismiss, but it makes a ton of UI hacks done for the iPhone needless. For example, the fact that the address bar isn't on the screen all the time is a hack to compensate for the small screen. Then that leads to a need for the hack where you click the top of the screen in the browser to rapidly scroll to the top. Sometimes that's a nice feature, but only if your screen is so small that they can't always display the address bar unless you've scrolled all the way to the top. Sometimes it's the most annoying thing in the world - like when you've scrolled past 7 pages of information reading in the browser and then accidentally click the rapid scroll-up button. There is no rapid scroll-down button to undo that.
My wife has an iPhone 5 and honestly it feels like a tiny little toy when I use it. The screen is ridiculously small.
Now for the other nice things... I can copy music to it without the iTunes bloatware. I plug my phone in, something pops up and then I just copy music to it. With Windows Phone, I have two copies of my music - my computer and my phone. With iPhone I had three copies - what was on my computer, what was on my phone and what the iTunes library. Keeping three things in sync was a massive pain.
The integration to Skydrive is much better than iCloud as well. My Lumia 928 has 32 GB of storage but with SkyDrive I get an additional 125 GB (of which 25 GB was free). I can seamlessly access pictures, video and music right from it as long as I have a signal.
The Nokia maps are the best maps application I ever used. Much better than either Google Maps or Apple Maps. Speaking of signal - the maps application have online and offline capabilities. So if I have no signal whatsoever there is a local copy of map data on my phone so I can still get directions.
I have three young kids and my Windows Phone has a KidZone. I put certain apps in there and then put it into the KidZone mode and my kids are locked into those apps unless they type my password. No more deleting icons accidentally, no more sending emails on my behalf accidentally, no more doing anything I don't want them to do like they did constantly with my iPhone.
This is long enough - the bottom line is that Windows Phone is superior in every way that matters to me to any iPhone I ever owned.
I have a Jelly Bean tablet with a 10.1" screen that I use every day and am happy with it.
To which I'd say the screens on WP8 and Android flagships are ridiculously large and poorly calibrated.
I feel as though I'm in the minority: but it pains me to use anything larger than an iPhone 4S. (The iPhone 5 included, sadly.)
I'd love to leave the iOS ecosystem, as I agree with your other criticisms. I long for the days where I can use foobar2k to manage my portable media player again -- but there's _no where for me to go._
The iPhone isn't a "little toy" to me, it's the only flagship phone I can use comfortably.
I feel left behind, as if I'm some sort of refugee from the display wars. -- Who will cater to me? Sony seems to be on the right track. At least their giant-Xperia has finally relocated the controls to be a bit more ergonomic.