Is Nadella the main reason why Windows Phone is no longer the focus?

[anon(7929613)]

Well, I cannot buy Joe's whole argument of app gap as the reason behind murder of WM. For starters, they themselves made sub par hardware and buggy software in L950/950 XL, then they started discouraging developers by making better apps on Android & iOS. It seems, they killed it purposefully to make Nadella happy. NADELLA IS THE MAIN REASON WHY WP IS ON A DEATH BED.

What do you think? Do you think that things could have been different and better if there was someone else?

 

[Laura Knotek]

I don't think the issue has anything to do with Mr Nadella.

The reason I left Windows Mobile was due to the app gap. I don't play games or use Snapchat. However, I was missing apps for my banks, my pharmacy, my medical information (contacting doctors and managing appointments), my auto insurance, etc.

 

[fatclue_98]

You can blame Nadella till the cows come home but Windows on mobile was spiraling well before he got here. His failure was doing nothing about it when there was still a chance.

Sent from my HP Elite x3 on mTalk

 

[Guytronic]

My main bang was my beloved Lumia 925 (which I still have and actually use)
However the resuming loading bug drove me nuts for low RAM and storage devices!

I honestly believe if Windows Phone was handled with zeal from the top floors at Microsoft it would have survived.
My opinion is that consumers started giving up when the leadership en mass at MS got scared and started pulling back not trusting Windows phone consumer sales figures.
Low sales figures should have triggered better marketing efforts and hardware changes to meet consumer needs in my opinion.

WP/WM is the most unique OS ever on a phone and shouldn't die.
Microsoft is doing a great disservice to anyone who follows the WP platform.
I think MS has misjudged what could have been.

 

[etphoto]

I think he had a lot to do with it. Common sense. If the head cook hates cooking fish the taste of that fish will eventually affect it's sale.

Twitter: @PhotographyET

 

[jlzimmerman]

It was a hard uphill battle that could have been won but the desire wasn't there with MS. WP had double digits in many countries and was climbing, slowly but still climbing, in the US to its top marketshare of 6%.

Nadella didn't have the desire for the required long-game and I'm sure the stakeholders had something to say about it too. Sacrifice the mobile vision for stock price.


PS - Rudy Huyn for CEO!

 

[anon(7929613)]

It was a hard uphill battle that could have been won but the desire wasn't there with MS. WP had double digits in many countries and was climbing, slowly but still climbing, in the US to its top marketshare of 6%.

Nadella didn't have the desire for the required long-game and I'm sure the stakeholders had something to say about it too. Sacrifice the mobile vision for stock price.


PS - Rudy Huyn for CEO!

In fact in some European countries, the market share had reached as high as 10%. And this was with WP8.1. But then there were no flagships after Lumia x30 for about 2 years. Then they followed it with buggy W10M. This shows their intentions.
I don't see any change in Microsoft's approach towards mobiles until leadership changes. I will say bring back Steven Elop.

 

[Guzzler3]

My thoughts on why things failed: Bad advertising, especially here in the USA.

Personally I found WP & WM to be a far superior mobile operating system from a user interface. The problem is that MS didn't really show it off here in the USA with their advertising campaigns. They tended to mimic other manufactures (cough, cough.. Apple) advertising styles. Which really didn't show off how much easier it was to use.

If you looked at the advertising campaigns in other countries, they REALLY showed off what you could do, and how easy it was to do things on Windows Mobile/Phone. People saw that and bought what they thought was a good system. But here in the USA you really saw none of that, except just people using some new device and being told how nice it was. If Microsoft's actually showed more device screen time, and more demo-isq in their commercials, I think more people would have bought more phones and then attracted more developers.

I for one, noted several times that when I showed people how to use a Windows Mobile/Phone and how nice the interface was, their initial reaction was "WOW!!! That is so cool! Why haven't we seen this before on TV ads?" I was able to convert several people from Android and iOS over because of just demos.

I also got some people who hadn't moved to a smart phone yet to choose Windows Mobile/Phone to be their first 'smart phone'. They loved it! Sadly because of MS not continuing down this road, they have had to move to either Android and iOS, and they have come back to me and literally said "Why in the hell do people rave about these phones? They suck compared to Windows phones!!!" (Disclaimer: I'm also one of them now, now that I moved to Android).

So I still say, the real reason why things failed, at least here in the USA, was due to really bad advertising.

 

[Player Piano]

Some might argue that ValueAct Capital killed WM.

 

[Neill Baldwin]

The thing I don't understand about what he said is they tried on the apps by offering to design them, etc. like they wanted to keep Windows Mobile going. Then why release below average flagships? Why not put a little more effort and make something that stuff out. Why was there no real push in advertising? The only push in advertising I ever remember for any phone Windows related was Nokia pushing the 1020. It just seems they really didn't try to hard

 

[docsp1]

Yes

 

[libra89]

I don't blame him. A lot of great points have already been said but I think Microsoft messed up by making the US market front and center. Considering the numbers they had in Europe and in other places, they failed by not continuing for the customers who had strong numbers for them.

I get wanting to focus on the US but why not just excel where you have strength and figure out a strategy to copy it in the US?

 

[etphoto]

I don't blame him. A lot of great points have already been said but I think Microsoft messed up by making the US market front and center. Considering the numbers they had in Europe and in other places, they failed by not continuing for the customers who had strong numbers for them.

I get wanting to focus on the US but why not just excel where you have strength and figure out a strategy to copy it in the US?

I agree with this.

Twitter: @PhotographyET

 

[tgp]

I think Microsoft messed up by making the US market front and center. Considering the numbers they had in Europe and in other places, they failed by not continuing for the customers who had strong numbers for them.

This seems obvious. Yet, I wonder if there wasn't a good reason Microsoft didn't focus on Europe. Were there legal implications that restricted it? If Europe (and other countries where WP was selling well) were low hanging fruit, I would think they would have jumped all over it if possible.

I suspect there are reasons we're not privy to. Maybe it stems back the Microsoft's conflict with the EU years ago. Who knows?

 

[LightenSkies]

Well at least now we know the long time rumor of countless articles on here that there won't be any Surface phone like many have said many times. Not to **** anyone off. I like My Lumia 950 and look at it and use it often across from it to my pc and always think to myself damn Microsoft if you screwed up what next screw up Windows 10 all together? Why even have the app store? Its no better on the Windows 10 front then it was on the Windows Mobile. Hint why you can now buy pc regular games and Xbox games. Its all its really useful on. Anything related to UWP is a joke in that store. Am I upset to a point sure I am. I paid 300 dollars for the Lumia 950 and I know I didn't pay 500 or 600 for it. Though Im an average Joe. So to be to have this phone at 300 is a real pleasure and as I stated before I just like how I can use many apps across devices. Though if this is How Windows 10 is being treated then they mind as well discontinue app store all together and just Have the windows 7 menu again with no live tiles. Cause once more like many have pointed out UWP is yet a failure now there no need for it. Its Windows 8 all over again.

On a side note. I still can't take awesome pics on my Lumia 950

 

[DOGC_Kyle]

Better marketing might've helped WP and W10M succeed, but it would have been pointless anyways.

They were trying to recreate their highly-successful desktop OS on a phone (with efforts such as Continuum, Office, UWP, full KB/M support).
But what was the point of that? It was never going to be as good as the real thing, so they might as well slim the real thing down so it fits on a phone. Which is what they're doing (with the changes to Windows Update, Windows 10 S, desktop app bridge, phone keyboard, and that's not even considering the rumors of Andromeda/WCOS).

Yes, they could have kept WP/W10M around, but they'd have to alienate those users later anyways.. would not have been easy to provide an upgrade path from a mobile OS to a desktop OS. Do you think another WP7>WP8>W10M would have been a good idea?
It was smarter for them to kill it, even though the future slimmed-down desktop OS might not be ready for 1-2 years.

Windows 10 mobile has been doomed ever since it was first conceived. The plan all along was to replace it with Windows 10.

Even other smartphone OSes wouldn't have existed if desktop OSes ran on phones. Just look at the original iPhone announcement.

 

[Troy Tiscareno]

I've written this on the CrackBerry forums but it applies here too.

The release of the iPhone in 2007 was an atom bomb that changed the history of smartphones forever. It was a massive leap forward in many areas, and the key here is that they were all areas that consumers valued. The iPhone announcement in January effectively started a clock on THE RACE. Which race is that? The race to be the OTHER platform.

It was a given that Apple's new mobile platform, built off of their very successful iPod, was going to occupy one of the 2 spaces - the question was: who would own the other?

Oh, were you one of those people who actually believed that there would be a 3rd? Or even a 4th? If so, you didn't pay attention to the closest analog available: the computer desktop, where there were only 2 commercial platforms (and a 3rd - Linux - that was both FREE and OPEN SOURCE, unlike the 2 leaders, and yet still has a single-digit percentage of the market).

The simple truth is that developers don't want to support 3 or 4 or 6 different platforms - that's inefficient for them and works against their best interests, which, ironically, is the VERY REASON that MS has prevailed in the desktop OS space - they owned one of the two available platform spaces.

The smartphone platform race occurred between 2007 and 2010 or maybe 2011. For sure, by 2011, it was clear who the winners would be.

The question you have to ask yourself is: what were the various companies offering back then?

We know WinMo 6.x was around, but was based around the stylus and resistive touch and could never compete with iOS and Android, even as rough as they were in those early years. Developers saw the big screens, touch UI, and all of those new sensors as a game-changer, and they flocked to iOS and Android. MS, BB, and others were trying to compete with legacy products because they got caught flatfooted - well, more correctly, because they were arrogant and didn't believe that Apple's long-rumored phone could possibly be a threat to their established platforms. I trust I don't need to post the Ballmer video to prove my point, right?

It turns out that those legacy platforms were part of the problem. None of the previous "competition" were willing to drop their old OSs overnight, and in Nokia's case, it took a new CEO and the infamous "burning platform" memo to create change there.

But the real competition was not for consumers - though they were important - it was really for DEVELOPERS. And MS simply didn't have everything else together and ready to go to fight the iPhone and then Android in 2008-9, and when they finally released WinMo7 in late October 2010, iOS and Android were on the final lap of the race, just as MS was getting out onto the track. It was those first 3-4 years where WinPhone lost, because developers could clearly see who had the best mobile platforms for developers in those years, and that was Apple and Google.

MS, though, wasn't finished failing. MS's roadmap could include SEVERAL complete resets, forcing developers to start over again several times over the next 6 years. That didn't happen with Apple or Google, because they weren't trying to join a new system to a legacy system, and didn't have all that baggage. Developers don't like having the rug pulled out from under them, and lots of those who had tried to give WinMo a shot gave up and left, devoting their attentions to the platforms that made them money - clearly that wasn't going to be WinMo.

The hand-wringing about Nadella is just like the complaints against John Chen for BB - new CEOs who came in to fix the business as a whole, and not the gangrenous limb that was killing the patient. Both were more than willing to saw off that limb to save the company, and the diehards will never forgive them for that, but neither were the people who caused the original disease in the first place. You have to look at who was in charge while rumors of an Apple smartphone began back in 2005, and grew stronger from multiple sources back in 2006. Who was it that was ignoring this threat, and not preparing to fight a (tech) war for mobile space? Hint: it wasn't Nadella or Chen.

MS is finished with smartphones. There won't be a SurfacePhone or any kind of Windows Phone until - perhaps - MS weans ALL users off of Win32 everywhere and everything on the desktop moves to a platform that can ALSO run on mobile hardware... WELL. IMO, that's a decade or more away. But until MS can re-enter the space using their desktop OS and ecosystem to create an opening, you can forget about a Windows Phone of any kind. At least, that's how I see it.

 

[Troy Tiscareno]

My thoughts on why things failed: Bad advertising, especially here in the USA.

While I won't say that MS's advertising was GREAT, it wasn't terrible either, and they sure spent a bundle on it. I remember them sponsoring several TV shows, including Hawaii 5-0, where characters spent a couple of seasons showing them off and "Binging" things and "sending to the SkyDrive".

Everyone knows the real reason - the MAIN reason - why WinPhone failed: lack of apps.

You could show off a neat phone to someone, and they might think it was really cool, but at some point in the conversation, you'd be asked "can I get [insert app name] on that?", and anything short of an enthusiastic, unqualified "yes" meant that most people were going to stick with what they knew.

Sure, a small percentage of users don't use apps (or not many), but not nearly enough to prop up a whole ecosystem. Developers only care about platforms that have users that DO use apps, and without THOSE users to generate money and interest, there's no way a manufacturer can cover the costs of R&D and manufacturing. Smartphones are incredibly complex, and R&D is incredibly expensive - which is fine if you're selling 50M or more phones per year and can spread out that cost across that huge number of devices. If you are selling anything less than 20M - and you're paying for your own platform - you are losing money. And MS lost a LOT of money.

 

[fatclue_98]

While I won't say that MS's advertising was GREAT, it wasn't terrible either, and they sure spent a bundle on it. I remember them sponsoring several TV shows, including Hawaii 5-0, where characters spent a couple of seasons showing them off and "Binging" things and "sending to the SkyDrive".

Everyone knows the real reason - the MAIN reason - why WinPhone failed: lack of apps.

You could show off a neat phone to someone, and they might think it was really cool, but at some point in the conversation, you'd be asked "can I get [insert app name] on that?", and anything short of an enthusiastic, unqualified "yes" meant that most people were going to stick with what they knew.

Sure, a small percentage of users don't use apps (or not many), but not nearly enough to prop up a whole ecosystem. Developers only care about platforms that have users that DO use apps, and without THOSE users to generate money and interest, there's no way a manufacturer can cover the costs of R&D and manufacturing. Smartphones are incredibly complex, and R&D is incredibly expensive - which is fine if you're selling 50M or more phones per year and can spread out that cost across that huge number of devices. If you are selling anything less than 20M - and you're paying for your own platform - you are losing money. And MS lost a LOT of money.

Just started watching season 8 of H50 and they're still using 950s.

Sent from my HP Elite x3 on mTalk

 

[T Moore]

The writing was on the wall when Belifore took his one year leave. A nobody took his place over Phones, no one from MS ever pushed for the phone again.