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Microsoft's Nadella Says Company Will Make More Phones, But They Won't Look Like Today's Devices (zdnet.com)
As he told the Make Me Smart podcast, Microsoft is looking for something far more transformative, like an entirely new category of smartphone that's so original and appealing that OEMs won't be able to resist tagging along. From a report: "At this point we're making sure that all of our software is available on iOS and Android and it's first class and we're looking for what's the next change in form and function," he said when asked whether Microsoft would make another phone. Nadella doesn't discuss what form these mobile devices could take, though Microsoft does have some candidates, like its HoloLens augmented reality (AR) headgear. No doubt he's keeping close tabs on Google's early progress with its Tango phone AR experiments.
It's not a promotion problem. It's a device problem. Which Windows Phone devices compete with the Galaxy S8? The iPhone 7?
They are always 6-12 months late (especially if you compare to Android, where they use the same components).
You simply get more with the competition.
That's been their MO for several decades. Someone comes out with a hot product, they copy it, pour gobs of money on marketing it, take losses for the first few years, but eventually take over the market. Unfortunately for them, that MO usually worked because they were able to leverage their Windows monopoly to help the product gain acceptance (Office, Internet Explorer, disk compression, disk encryption, etc). The Xbox is one of their few successes at this independent of Windows, Zune probably the most notable failure.
It would've been a lot easier for them if they'd actually thought ahead to what the future might bring, instead of copying others. Back in the 1990s they managed to displace Palm as the market leader for PDA OSes (by copying Palm but promising to make their OS share the Windows API). By the late 1990s it was obvious to most everyone that PDAs and phones would converge. All Microsoft had to do was add phone support to WinCE (which became Windows Mobile). But a few WinCE PDA companies tried to add phone functionality to their PDAs, and got no help from Microsoft. Their products were panned by reviewers for failing to work consistently as a phone, which is kinda important since phones are historically very reliable. The new smartphone market instead ended up being taken over by Blackberry (in North America) and Nokia (in Europe) who added PDA capability to their phones. And Microsoft has been trying to play catch-up ever since.
What they didn't do is allow carriers to completely rebuild the OS like Google does.
I've been around a while and I recall quite clearly how the windows phone fanboys were crowing about how Nokia had an arrangement with MS where they could do exactly this to the Windows Phone OS and how they were going to crush Android and all the other OEMs. We see how that worked out.
The fact is that people just don't like what MS was offering. I had a Windows Phone with version 7 of the OS a few years ago just to play around with. You know what? It sucked.
The Nokia phones were very nice phones. The problem with the Windows Phone OS is the lack of Apps. For example, when I got my Surface Pro 4 I tried to find the same apps that I use on my Android tablet and my iPhone and they just don't exist for Windows. Granted, with a full fledged tablet computer like the Surface Pro 4 you don't need apps, but they tend to be simpler and quicker to launch than the full web page.
"Natively". You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
"Success" only in the sense that it wasn't an outright failure. Xbox never "took over the market" like Microsoft's more Windows-centric conquests. The Playstation 2 massively outsold the original Xbox, which only just edged out the GameCube. The Playstation 3 was neck and neck with the Xbox 360, both of which got outsold by the Wii. The Xbox One has lost decisively to the Playstation 4 and has been outsold by the Wii U.
If MS can't kill it, steal it or control it, they're not interested in it. This is what results from a business model that disdains the new and seeks to be the late comer with overwhelming resources. Giving people what someone else is already providing seems a sucky future. Good luck keeping up with Apple and Google, Mr Nadella.