My 1520 is my first WP, but my Z30 is my. . . . I can't keep track of how many Blackberries I've had and loved going back to my first smartphones, so I bring that perspective to the thread. Blackberry was a novelty to the tech press, then a phenomenon, then an institution, then a slowing behemoth, then in a dead stall and now. . . . a kind of curious oddity by virtue of its insistence in soldiering on. The Tech Press, IMHO, has long been inbedded (sp.) with IOS and/or Android, that's where the most eyeballs are, the most clicks. Blackberry was the **** of jokes and dancing on its grave (even at launch events) was a means of currying favor and for the Tech press to demonstrate loyalty to the market leaders.
Anti-Windows bias, in contrast to the mildly malignant indifference to Blackberry, goes way, way back to the early ages of mass personal computing. Not an easy history to negate, however shiny or clever your ad campaign is. I don't think WP ads are bad, its just that in the US at least, they are all but invisible. I take some heart that MS is having some penetration with their Surface ads, so they are capable of attracting attention when motivated and funded. MS has resources that Blackberry does not, to counteract negative coverage and to withstand slow sales. I am not altogether sold on the value of ad campaigns for smartphones anyway. Sure, they help around the edges, but it seems a strange market, self-informed and largely driven through carrier-connections in carrier stores. Apple and Android still have the run of almost every smartphone retail outlet in the US. The carrier stores are always pushing either a certain Android or the Iphone and are all-but-hiding the other alternatives. I think the Lumia line has laid the groundwork and the 8.1 OS and beyond are more than competitive whereby MS can now bring some of its economic might to start making inroads. I am also hopeful that the new Blackberry models coming out by the end of the year will also open a few eyes.
Android may be a juggernaut and Apple, well whenever they get around to releasing the My Big Fat Iphone the trained tech press will sit up and bray like donkeys and that will use up most of the oxygen. Truth for me is that Apple has been as dull as dishwater for a long time now but some see that as a by-product of their having already attained perfection. Google and Apple represent huge, tectonic elemental economic forces and can not be lightly or quickly moved from their predominating positions. But their tremendous accumulated inertia does not render them impossibly impervious. It is an enormous undertaking and challenge and beyond shiny tv spots and jingles. Microsoft has always played a masterful long game.