Slashdot Mirror
Satya Nadella: 'We Clearly Missed the Mobile Phone' (mashable.com)
At the Wall Street Journal's WSJD Live conference, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admitted that Microsoft has largely failed in making a dent in the mobile hardware business. Nadella, who took over the command of Microsoft from Steve Ballmer in February 2014, however added that the company is now focused on doing well in new categories and also building new categories. He said:We clearly missed the mobile phone, there's no question. Our goal now is to make sure we grow new categories. We have devices which are phones today but the place where we are focused on, given where the market is, is what is the unique thing that our phone can do. We have a phone that in fact can replace your PC, the same way we have a tablet that can replace your laptop. Those are the categories that we want to go create. If anything, the lesson learned for us, was thinking of PC as the hub for all things for all time to come. It was perhaps one for the bigger mistakes we made.
Microsoft misses because they don't engage developers - they said (Balmer famously said) it was all about developers but they really actually don't give a shit as long as the big corps still pay their licence fees. See XNA, see engagement over mobile, seeing the pathetic attempts at outreach with their bizspark programme. They do not care about providing an innovative, interesting and exciting platform for software developers to work on. It's a shame because I like Windows Phone as a platform but without spending a lot more money on developer engagement and support it was always going to fail.
There'sno chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance. It's a $500 subsidized item. They may make a lot of money. But if you actually take a look at the 1.3 billion phones that get sold, I'd prefer to have our software in 60 percent or 70 percent or 80 percent of them, than I would to have 2 percent or 3 percent, which is what Apple might get,". Steve ballmer in a 2007 interview with USA Today.
Microsoft didn't even see it coming.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
They completely failed despite trying for many years. I'm not talking about what they've done post iPhone and iPad; they were making Windows XP based tablets and Windows CE based phones back in the early 00s and similar products even earlier. Nobody wanted to use them. I hate Apple's arrogance and elitism but they did succeed at something that Microsoft failed.
That's why I'm pretty skeptical about their ability to build "new categories." It seems much more likely they'll fuck around with some tech and produce something that completely misses the point, and then Apple, Google, or some new upstart will come along and do it correctly
Microsoft didn't 'miss' the iPhone - since their basic business model had always been to sit back and copy whatever big new thing Apple (or anybody else, for that matter) came up with - and count on tie-ins to the desktop to make their copy succeed. What they missed was Android, which swooped in and stole the OEM market from them. By the time they were ready to move the app barrier to entry was too big. That said, Blackberry missed Android too - they failed from a leadership position.
They failed with their iPod clone too - but for a different reason. iPods were fairly cheap, and they tied your music collection to the Apple ecosystem. And iPods worked with Windows as well as anything else - i.e., they were cheap enough and limited enough in functionality that MS couldn't leverage Windows to out-compete Apple.
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...