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Microsoft Convinced That Windows 10 Will Be Its Smartphone Breakthrough

Posted by samzenpus on from the for-sure-this-time dept.

jfruh (300774) writes At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, handset manufacturers are making all the right noises about support for Windows 10, which will run on both ARM- and Intel-based phones and provide an experience very much like the desktop. But much of the same buzz surrounded Windows 8 and Windows 7 Phone. In fact, Microsoft has tried and repeatedly failed to take the mobile space by storm.

4 of 445 comments (clear)

  1. Try and try again. by Frobnicator · · Score: 5, Informative

    It is actually kind of sad if you know their history.

    Back in the day they were competing with Palm, and had Windows CE and Pocket PC 2000. When PocketPC 2002 came out my employer switched over from Palm and I got to rewrite a bunch of tools. They did pretty good for a while with Mobile 2003, and Windows Mobile 5. It knocked Palm down several notches in the mobile market, with Palm losing value and getting bought out in 2005.

    The fun thing about that era is that there were phones with PDAs in them, you can go back to "Pocket PC Phone Edition" for that. Each version of Windows Mobile supported running in phones, but they never took off.

    The iPod was getting some power and some apps, but I loved that with a single CF card I could have my entire music library on my device; the Axim x51v used the same audio chipset as the iPod of the era coupled with better playback software where you could mix and such. It also offered all kinds of apps making the device useful for the other common tasks of the time like calendar, email, and web over both wifi and bluetooth.

    Again you could get phones running WM5 and WM6 with all their apps, and in late 2006 they had 51% of the market. Blackberry had 37%, Palm was 9%, and Symbian at 9%.

    Then came the iPhone. At the time I didn't really see the reason for the hype, when it came to processor power, memory, and even 3D graphics the iPhone was less powerful than my Windows 6 phone.

    As the numbers came back, iOS rose and WM feel by the same percent; the other companies were flat in market share. By early 2007 Windows Mobile drooped to 42% and iOS was at 11%. By 2008, WM had 29% and iOS 19% and Android had entered at 2%. By 2010 Windows Mobile devices had dropped to 7% market share, Blackberry had dropped to 25%, Palm to 3%, and Symbian at 2%.

    Phones running Windows Mobile continued to exist, but that's about it. Three more versions of Windows Mobile, the three editions as Windows Phone, they have never been able to get their market share back anywhere near 2006 levels.

    --
    //TODO: Think of witty sig statement
    1. Re:Try and try again. by Pieroxy · · Score: 4, Informative

      WM 5/6 was a piece of shit of a great magnitude. You mush be some kind of shill to even pretend it was worth anything. You had to reboot the phone basically on a daily basis to get anything running. The second day the photo app would stop working, the next one the alarm clock and the third day your phone would not even ring when called. I got several of them at the time.

      Not mentionning you had to spend your days in the task manager killing the apps that you launched during the last hour to get back some memory and hope to run other apps.

      Ah, and updating the OS or apps for that matter would take 205 steps on your computer.

      I got an iPhone 1 (a gift) in early 2008 and the difference was just that the shit was working. It was inferior to both my former windows phones in terms of spec (ALL of them save the screen size) but the shit was just running smooth. What a relief! I remember the firs time I updated iOS. I realized the phone had been running for TWO MONTH without a reboot. Whishful thinking coming from WM5/6. And it didn't even have apps !

      To all the naysayers that will deny Apple their "revolution", man, there was one and of a great magnitude. But it was not the hardware. It was software that worked on the hardware. This made all the difference.

      --
      Write boring code, not shiny code!
  2. Where I see Windows phones... by VAXcat · · Score: 3, Informative

    The only place I ever see Windows phones is on TV series as glaringly obvious product placement...never seen one in the wild.

    --
    There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
  3. Re:Breakthrough? by rogoshen1 · · Score: 2, Informative

    The only point I was trying to make is that people waste money on things with absolutely no payoff, all the time.

    Given the meager cost, and extremely high payoff (albeit incredibly rare odds) there are far more illogical things people spend money on. =/

    Leave it to the autists as always to not see the forest for the trees.