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.

Comments

First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Sent from my Windows phone.

Re: First Post

[Anonymous Coward]

Liar! No one has a Windows Phone!

Re:First Post

[peragrin]

And how old is that phone?

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.

Re:First Post

[paiute]

Microsoft didn't even see it coming.

Microsoft is a lot like Wile E. Coyote. We can see that the anvil is going to land squarely on them, but they never seem to be able to look far enough into the future to see it themselves.

Re:First Post

[Rob Y.]

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.

No you don't

[110010001000]

"We have a phone that in fact can replace your PC"

No. You don't. Because that isn't possible to do. The fact that this guy even said that means he is clueless about mobile. He needs to be replaced.

Re:No you don't

[Archangel Michael]

The problem with Microsoft, is that they view themselves as a "Windows" company. I've said this for years, and was laughed at a long time ago. They are still a "Windows" company. Everything they do, they try to tie into "Windows" regardless of whether or not it fits that product. In the end, they will be a Windows company.

Their mistake, is thinking "Windows" when they should have been thinking "Technology"

Re:No you don't

[DickBreath]

Xbox = Windows
Data Center = Windows
Phones = Windows
Tablets = Windows

But what does the rest of the world use to run GPS navigators, cameras, routers, set top boxes, thermostats, wrist watches, super computers, and more? That would be Linux.

What do developers use? Linux. Microsoft admitted as much when they said the reason for bash on Windows was to lure developers back.

Maybe you shouldn't have driven developers away with Windows Surface, a whole new App API, and your crappy app store. Oh, but Surface also drove OEMs away because it back stabbed them by competing directly with them on hardware. And Surface drove users away, because it sucked. Wow. Developers, OEMs and Users. What a master stroke the Surface was!

Developers, developers, developers

[undulato]

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.

Making sense

[ErichTheRed]

The only thing I hope is that now that Nadella actually said those words, they're going to stop trying to turn their operating systems into an iOS or Android clone. Saying they're done with Windows Phone unburdens them from having to try to revive Windows Store and the Universal Apps model. I am very skeptical about whether they'd do this, but they could also (shock! horror!) completely separate PC mode and tablet mode, and make Windows behave more like a desktop OS when run on PC hardware. Just doing that one change would probably convert the last Windows 7 holdouts.

That said, this is a very expensive "oops." What I see doing engineering work for Windows shops is the need to monetize everything else -- Azure is being pushed extremely hard, and this is where Microsoft is going to make all their money in the future. All new features are Azure-first these days and backported to the packaged products. What's probably going to happen is that they're going to make it so cumbersome to run on-premises Windows Server and other Microsoft products that most companies will just throw their hands up and move everything they own to Azure. After that, they're locked in permanently and Microsoft will enter its new phase as the 21st Century IBM. Just like IBM collecting monthly mainframe revenue, they'll collect monthly fees from Azure customers, who will be even more dependent on Microsoft than they are now.

The other super-smart thing they've done is realize that the OS wars are over. You can run Linux in Azure as a first-class citizen. They do this to compete with AWS, but they also know that being OS-agnostic long term allows them to keep collecting revenue perpetually. I just hope they redeploy the Windows Phone people who are still there to new projects instead of throwing another few thousand techies onto the unemployment pyre.

Re:Sure you missed it

[DickBreath]

Microsoft laughed at the iPhone. No vision at all.

But then, Microsoft (Bill Gates) said (in 1995) that the internet was a fad. That should make you think about how much vision they have. It's in their DNA to be only a monopolist. They can't compete in any open market. That is why everything must be always tied back to Windows.