Lack of choice drives away customers. The iPhone has a large enough ecosystem and following to buck that trend, but only just. In the US, Apple is way down on marketshare.
Except we have plenty of choice. Problem is distribution. Basing off the majority of the users...they want Lumia. Unfortunately the US....the last high end lumia was last summer with the 925 on T-Mobile and Last year with the 1520.
Thank Goodness the Lumia 1520 is still a Titan and more than adequate to be sold still today a year later. But it is now discontinued...on att I believe.
Which leaves users with HTC One M8 as their sole choice.....which most people do not want at all as it seems like most of the M8 owners are in fact Verizon and T-Mobile customers not att customers. It's just a guess based off of the posts I read in the forums. It's also a hypothesis since att tends to get the best Lumias most owners are quite content or waiting successors(i.e. 1020 and 1520).
Verizon fares a little better...it lacks of a flagship Lumia now(Unless you buy through 3rd party) but it does still offer the Samsung Ativ SE which is adequate and I recommend over the M8 as it beats it in most specs except the processor and speaker plus it has the M8.
The choice are there for the majority in theory. The problem is these stupid exclusives.
HTC isn't much better. It was reported that HTC was supposed to be bringing the M8 globally/internationally. So far it's on 3 carriers within 4 months in the US. So those minority who do want the M8 can't get it right now.
So it is not just a Microsoft/Lumia thing. It's an overall windows phone thing.
If Microsoft was smart they'd work to release the 930/Icon to Att and T-Mobile to give those users who want it that choice since a lot of people are settling for what they can get. The m8....and I've seen more than a few reports in articles and the forums of people who went M8 and came back to their Lumias. Because they don't like the phone or it just wasn't good enough for them.
The only thing flawed is your skewed logic. If Microsoft didn't care about OEMs, they would not have provided NATIVE dot view support in WP. That wasn't an HTC addition, but it most certainly IS an HTC only tech.
The situations are different, yes, but you missed the vital point: You do not screw over business partners. Microsoft is first and foremost a software company, which it excels at. Just like Apple is first and foremost a hardware company, which it excels at. If Apple had the ecosystem and market share WP has, it could NOT survive as a single entity. They would need OEMs to make up for the shortcomings. That is how Android is beating Apple. Limitless OEMs, hits all price ranges, and now has the ecosystem. MS has only one of those which is not enough.
It won't take much of a difference to sink WP anymore. Especially since it appears MS is more interested in low-mid range devices, which limits another market segment. Someone has to pick up the extra markets and its only a win-win for WP if someone does.
I never said they didn't care about their OEMs. I simply said the OEMs don't matter because they don't.
Android benefited from having a strong OEM support from its inception and it has the market share it has. Apple succeeded in being first. People seem to think this OS NEEEDS all these OEMS and in reality it does not.
It needs apps. Snapchat, A full fledged first party app for Vine, Instagram, and all those stupid pointless games that I never heard of before on IOS and android. If we had better app equality for all 3 OS then we'd have a fighting chance.
it does not matter if 100 more OEMs join into the WP team, if they are barely selling devices and market share is still sitting at 3-5 percent globally(or lower), we're not going to get anywhere.
Microsoft needs to stop trying to adopt the android way with all these low end phones because they are alienating their primary supporters and they need to focus on their OS and optimize and better it.
They have the loyalty of the users based on the hardware(Lumia).....the other 3 percent are just...there.
They need to start adapting an APPLE mindset and bringing out innovative things within the OS and marketing better to get people to buy their products.
Keeping Hey Cortana in Lumia will highlighting the superb camera quality of Lumia. Work some partnership out with Instagram and Vine to sponsor those who get a Lumia to come up with some cool photoshoot or super cool vine clip made WITH a lumia and they earn cash prize or something,. A Campaign of some sort.
Microsoft does not need this other OEMs because the Other Oems bring nothing to table and I stand by that. Thankfully, with my job, I am able to voice my opinion more about this and ideas I have as I am very passionate about Windows Phone and Lumia products.