I've always thought if Windows Phone was as good as IOS or Android & 95% of the major apps where there it would see a good adoption rate, but something that happened to me 2 times this week have me thinking MS has a lot of work to do. One was with my 17 yr old & the other with my wife.
Situation #1
We were out eating dinner with friend who are moving. Dinner was over & it's time for the group photo. I'm the only WP user everyone else has IPhones (1 out of 4) We all pull our phones out, my daughter who is the photo queen of the family says "use daddy's camera it's way better than ours especially in bad light" I give the waiter my phone he takes the pic & comments on how nice the photo was along with the screen. He then asks what kind of phone is it. I reply it's a Nokia windows phone without even thinking. My daughter then chimes in & says "yeah, it's a really cool phone with a killer camera, but I don't like it because it too different." The waiter replies, "yeah, I would get lost trying to use it & go nuts. Too bad it's not like my IPhone."
Situation #2
My wife needed to use my phone to search for something while shopping. She grabs my phones & starts looking at the screen (looking for Safari I guess?) I tell her to hit the search button & start typing what she is looking for, you don't have to open the browser & Google it.... She immediately says this isn't Google & need Google to search. I said you don't need Google to search. She sits there & stares at the screen for a sec or 2 & says " I don't like it, it's different" I then long pressed the search button asked Cortana to search for what she wanted, the results came up very fast with all the normal WP 8.1 results. She then says " That was really cool, but I don't care if it's better or faster, it's different & I don't like it."
You have 2 generations of smartphone users, two 17 yr olds & a 42 yr old that have the same mind set. Which is They don't care if the product or software is better. They don't like it & refuse to even try it because it's different than what they currently know. It is too much of a hassle or bother to learn something new even if it is faster or better. Think about that & how you combat that frame of mind as I suspect most average consumers(because these 3 are your typical everyday consumer) think the same. Go with what is comfortable, safe & everyone else has even it is slower or doesn't have all the best feature?